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1. my Christmas shopping is nearly done
2. our Thanksgiving trip to Seattle is over
3. our Christmas trip to Seattle is still weeks away
4. I have not been bitten by the Christmas Decorating Bug yet
5. the kids have two solid weeks of school before Christmas break
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Christmas vacation will be strange -- they won't be able to play outside like they can during the summer, and I am unsure of how many days there I'll have my two extra daycare kiddos, but revising and editing are going to become my B.F.F.s and so here we go....
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While all of my friends and writing colleagues are finishing their 50,000-word piles of basura, I will be shining EMERALD CAVE until it glimmers and gleams!!!
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On the book front -- my son Nathan got a $25 gift certificate to Barnes & Noble, and so I basically talked him into getting two books out of the How to Train Your Dragon series by Cressida Cowell, and so far I'm totally digging them! Nathan's in 2nd grade and has only been speaking/reading English for less than two years, so it will take him some time to kick into gear on books of that length, but he'll get there. What I find fascinating is the illustrations are by the author, and they are rough at best. Here I have been worrying all of my comic book artist buddies for fan art for EMERALD CAVE, and what I should do is just crack open one of the old sketchbooks in my art room and get to WORK! I *used* to be able to draw!
#GetCrackin'Cynthia!!!
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What Nathan doesn't know is, he is also getting the boxed set of Percy Jackson books by Rick Riordan for Christmas, but yes -- those are mainly for me at this point, too. LOL The kids are all raking in the books lately, which is awesome. Our family, while we all enjoy plenty of Plants vs. Zombies and Zuma, are not electronically oriented...on purpose. We don't have a Wii or an XBox, or whatever the hell else is so freaking exciting to have right now. We barely watch TV. The kids will turn the TV off when one of them realizes it's been on too long or no one is watching it. They need to read. I grew up reading, their father grew up reading, and it's just simply what we do!
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For my reading list (in addition to all of the books I will be stealing from the kids' rooms over the next few months), I added a little stack after running through Olympia's Half-Price Books yesterday: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx, The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, Barefoot by Elin Hilderbrand, Still Waters by Portland author Jennifer Lauck who wrote Blackbird, Jewel by Bret Lott -- the description began "In the backwoods of Mississippi, a land of honeysuckle and grapevine, Jewel and her husband Leston are truly blessed; they have five fine children," which made me wonder what goes wrong...LOL.
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And I also picked up Blinding Light by Paul Theroux because of it's excellent backcover copy: "Blinding Light is a slyly satirical novel of manners and mind expansion. (How awesome is that sentence?) Slade Steadman, a writer (LOVE books about writers!) who has lost his chops (OH NO!), sets out for the Ecuadorian jungle (well, who wouldn't?!?!) with his ex-girlfriend (wuh???) in search of inspiration and a rare hallucinagen. (I AM SOLD AT THIS POINT...LOL!) The drug, once found, heightens both his powers of perception and his libido (good...I'm with ya...), but it also leaves him with an unfortunate side effect: periodic blindness. (Hold the phone!) Unable to resist the insights that enable him to write again, Steadman spends the next year of his life in thrall to his psychedelic muse and his erotic fantasies, with consequences that are both ecstatic and disastrous." (Awesome!!! I'm reading this one FIRST!!! haha)
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So I have a lot to do. But since it's 2 in the morning, I will go to bed for now. Our Thanksgiving here at home with just the kids is tomorrow. We may be eating later than planned since the cook is still awake in the middle of the night. Oops!
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Peace and bubbles,
Cynthia
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