Life update: where I've been. Stories sold. Christmas already?!


I disappeared into a medical writing assignment for a few weeks, then crawled out to find the house in chaos and the hurly-burly of the Christmas season well underway. All the neighbors strung lights in their yards when I wasn't looking; Christmas jingles play in the stores, lights and wreaths and Christmas trees are everywhere. Each year this season sneaks up upon me; this year it seemed to wait till the last minute before jumping out, waving its arms, crying Ha! Gotcha! Did you forget about me?

My mind filled with the technical details of a dozen scientific journal articles. . . I nearly did forget.

But the Christmas tree is up, the stockings are hung, and tonight was my daughters’ annual Christmas music recital. Both acquitted themselves well, if I do say so myself. My eldest finished a scarf she’d been weaving for me on her little loom kit, and I proudly wore it to the concert and all evening.  Dinner out (barbecue), bath time, bed. . . Outside the nights dip ever deeper, ever blacker, as the year tilts toward the solstice. But inside all is warm and snug. Throughout the neighborhood, all along the side streets, golden lights glow in bare branches.

I sold two stories recently. I signed the contracts for both this week. These sales make me so excited and happy—I can’t even tell you. I’m dancing inside, like a kid on Christmas.

I turn 40 this week.

In a week and a half, family members will drive hundreds of miles to see us. My kids are practically jumping out of their skin at the thought of seeing their beloved cousins again. My husband the gourmet is busy planning the menus of holiday feasts.

There are terrible things going on in the world. The news is full of them. It’s been full of them for weeks, for months now, it seems--an unending drumbeat of horror. I haven’t even been able to bring myself to read the latest news articles about state-sanctioned torture.
For now, I just want to withdraw. I want to push all those news headlines away, to not click on the articles. I don’t want to work or clean the house. For now, I just want to read and write. Write and read. For this last week before the kids’ winter break and the onrush of (welcome) visitors and the true hurly-burly of the Christmas holidays. 

Comments

  1. AnonymousDecember 15, 2014 at 5:43 AM

    Happy Birthday!

    Very nice sentences that capture the season.

    "Outside the nights dip ever deeper, ever blacker, as the year tilts toward the solstice. But inside all is warm and snug. Throughout the neighborhood, all along the side streets, golden lights glow in bare branches."

    ReplyDelete
  2. bean-writerDecember 15, 2014 at 6:25 AM

    Aww, thank you so much. And best of the holiday season to you!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On memoir and things I have no experience of—A review of "Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life" by William Finnegan

I know nothing about surfing. I've never stood on a board. I've never even seen surfing done in real life (I've spent most of my life in the American Midwest. And even when I lived in Los Angeles for college, I somehow never met any surfers). Yet it came into my head to write a story that involved surfing. So I read a lot. I was interested in big-wave surfing, so I read Susan Casey's book, "The Wave." I read a lot of journalistic accounts. I watched videos online. And eventually, probably inevitably, I stumbled upon a two-part article in The New Yorker. The article is titled " Playing Doc's Games" by William Finnegan, and it was published in 1992. It is famous among surfers. The surf magazine The Inertia called it " possibly the greatest surf story ever" and a writer at The Surfer described it as "the best written piece (all 39,000 words of it) ever penned about surf culture."  I am not a surfer. Yet Wi
Read more

Short fiction recs! Oct-Nov 2023

Some stories that I read and loved, from October through November.    Fantasy “Four Words Written on My Skin” by Jenn Reese in Uncanny Magazine When the Fae stole my wife, I followed them into the dark woods to win her back.   A short but achingly sharp and lovely piece about finding what’s been lost. The Fae stole the narrator’s wife, but the narrator has been losing Jess for a long time, before the Fae ever appeared. What follows is a confrontation with the narrator’s own responsibility for that loss, for the distance that’s grown between them. And, at the end, a glimmer of hope—the decision to choose to love. Beautifully told.     “Six Versions of my Brother Found Under the Bridge,” by Eugenia Triantafyllou in Uncanny Magazine Technically it was built on top of a river that had been dredged and filled in some fifty years ago which made the ground under the bridge degraded and pretty dangerous. But rumor had it—and by rumor Olga meant Maria’s oldest cousin who had be
Read more

Short fiction recs! June-July 2024

So many beautiful, strange stories I’ve read this summer so far. Here are only a few. Strange Tales of Beauty and Horror “Markets of the Otherworld” by Rati Mehrotra in Uncanny Magazine In the Market of Illusions, I writhed on the cobblestoned street that wound between the gilded stalls, gasping for air, convinced I was a goldfish. Someone dragged me to a fountain and pushed me in, breaking the spell and—a minor point, except the water was ice cold—drenching me to the skin.   In the Cat Market, I was pursued by a large white Persian and coerced into signing away a month of my life in return for the privilege of petting her. In my dreams, I still run my fingers through her thick, beautiful fur while she leans against me and hums in pleasure. Worth it, I tell myself, even as I wonder which month of life has been taken from me.   An absolutely gorgeous, magical, and at times melancholy tale of a woman traveling through the enchanting markets of other worlds. A story that’s al
Read more