Unfortunately, as you all know, I’ve slipped just a touch this past week in my standing as Most Successful Member of the Family. To wit: after many months of super-duper readings at great venues to vicious applause and unyielding lauding, traci’s book Recipes for Endangered Species has been panned. She was thrilled. “Look at this,” she said, “it says here, ‘I felt as if I had left a loving homestead filled with ancestral love and spiritual light to go get a job as a stripper in the city, had sold my child for drugs, and dumped my beloved cat in the trash, and walked away as it mewed. I wanted to go to sleep, but was afraid of my dreams.’”
Absolutely thrilled. She said, “This reviewer hated my book, but this review won’t make people not want to read it.”
I on the other hand felt my married-up status slipping along with traci’s grammar: “ . . . won’t make people not . . .” – so you wonder: what kind of rhetorical Wal-Marts does traci construct while you’re all away? – “won’t make people not”: that kind.
(Should that be while “y’all’re away?”)
With my PhD. a mere language requirement away, and people talking smack about traci’s writing, I thought for sure I would have to start picking my nose while teaching or throwing snowballs at Pat and Olga’s kids and blaming it on the sky. And, hell, it’s not even likely to snow here again until we leave for Utah in December. I was at an impass.
Suddenly, on Tuesday Nickole Brown from White Pine Press called traci. Turns out traci’s manuscript of prose poems Shell-Shaped Pieces of Bone was a finalist for the Marie Alexander Poetry Series. A really awesome series from a really awesome press.
While we found out this past weekend that she did not win, I was consoled by the fact that I’m back, baby. There’s no way I’m going to accomplish as much as traci any time soon, so who is the most excited in the world that I married traci? Clearly, it's this guy:
But, in all fairness, Blaisey's a close second.
Post Script: National Novel Writing Month – good attempts all around at our house. The Epic Asskicking Adventures of Princess Badass topped 8,000 words during the first week, then quickly fell from favor. Instead, I started working on my Western (The Wickedest City) again, and that went well. traci clacked steadily away at her novel – she got closer to maybe 10-12,000 words. While still shy of the 50,000 words the National Novel Writing Month experts look for, she has laid some ground work for a novel that I’m sure you all will be interested in. I’m burying Princess Badass for the time being, but traci’s going to stick with hers. I hear December is National Plutonium Enrichment Month – which means the ancient Connor family mantra (Hold My Beer I Wanna Try Something) has never been more fitting.
Writing is something you do because you can't not do it.
ReplyDeleteNot you, too, Carter.
ReplyDelete