If anyone is still reading this, I’m so so sorry. I have lots of excuses—busy time of year at my job, trying to do right by the students I’m working with in independent studies, some fun writing/teaching stuff in the works for spring—but the excuses don’t put words on the page. Not here, and not on my manuscript, either.

I finally broke through this weekend and picked the book back up. I’m doing line-by-line edits on the whole thing with the hopes of getting it out the door to an agent around the first of the year. My first new year’s resolution, right there.

I’ve managed a little bit of reading, so let’s start there.

61. Murder on the Bride’s Side– Tracy Kiely
I met Tracy at Bouchercon this fall. Very nice lady, and what’s this? Mysteries that use Jane Austen plots—without making Jane Austen either the murder victim or the investigating detective, this is very key for me—and Austen quotes aplenty? Don’t mind if I do. These are charming, though the completist in me cannot stand that I started with the second book in the series. GAH, it burns.

62. The Complete Winnie-the-Pooh– A.A. Milne
I hear you laughing, but I don’t care. One of the gifts I got as a newborn was a Pooh, and it is the companion of my childhood. And adulthood. I love it beyond reason. I also renamed it Sue (Winnie-the-Sue, not quite getting how these things work) early on, and started dolling it up in dresses. This didn’t seem odd to me until I took my transvestite Pooh to college. Sue was an institution in my family that’s hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t there. For instance, it took no time at all to find this:

My sister, me with Sue (in a dress, yessir), my grandma, a car the size of the missing civilization of Atlantis. In which we never ever wore seatbelts. See all that corn in the background? Welcome to my childhood. See the scrunch-face I’m making? This is why I wear sunglasses all the time. Scrunch-face gives you wrinkles.

REGARDLESS. I love the Pooh stories, too, and thoroughly enjoyed revisiting them. There’s a lot of writing advice bits and bobs in these books. They were a nice surprise.

Like:
Eeyore was saying to himself, “This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated, if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it.”

And:
Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you.

And the best one:
When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.

So I’m still just trying to make the thing that seemed Thingish inside my Very Little Brain to be Thingish enough to share with you. Thanks for hanging on until I can.