Friday Done List

The big thing I'm done with is travel and celebrating. Yes, vacationing always provides me with some creative ideas, but they get buried under the work involved to get ready to go somewhere and clean up afterward and the work piling up at home.

Don't you just love First World Problems? I know I do. They're the best possible kind.

I did manage to squeeze a little work in over the last few weeks. Oh! And you know what else! I met my Goodreads reading goal for the year. 

Goal 1. Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor

• I had another humor piece published last week, though you'd never know it here, because I didn't get around to doing a post about it. Next week.
• I dug around in old emails and discovered I'd received a rejection I didn't know about a while back.
• Got another rejection a few days ago.
• Started revising that last rejection, because the next place I want to submit to wants fewer words.
• Continued work on an eating-ish memoir piece, which is actually a revision of something I wrote twenty years ago. It's going to have a twist now.

Goal 2. Submit 143 Canterbury Road to agents. (Has turned into submitting any book length work to anyone.)

• I spent a few days making a synopsis for a book I haven't submitted anywhere in years so I could submit it to an agent open to SCBWI writers during the month of September.
• Made the above submission. Yes! I am calling this doing two things. 

Goal 3. Community Building/Marketing/Branding

• Added a number of newly published pieces to the website earlier this summer, which I may or may not have mentioned.
• Added another newly published piece to the website today, so that we're not dealing with so many changes at once. Also updated my bio and took out some dead links.
• Read a couple of things that have inspired me to get Time Management Tuesday going again, at least for the next month or so.
• Wrote next Tuesday's Time Management Tuesday post.

Some Annotated Reading October 3

I have just finished a week of birthday observances, all for the same person. Me. That, on top of the two weeks of vacation less than a month ago has left me reeling over all the minor life and work details I need to address. Overwhelmed.

I did keep reading though. I can always keep reading.

Books

I finished a couple more nineteenth century historical mysteries, both in the same series, which is going down hill as series often do.

I've read some more of Best Travel Writing of 2018. That book is so long.

Short Form

Emily is the Quintessential Privileged White American Girl by Martine Nyx in Cinemania. I started watching this show after it had been out for a season or so for the French with English subtitles. I'd already finished Dix Pour Cent (there is no comparison) and hadn't discovered Lupin. Yes, you do have to wonder, What is the attraction with this show? Even if you don't hate it, as many people do, what is there, really, to even hold your attention?

When Good Artists Do Bad Things by Citizen Reader at Books Are Our Superpower. I don’t know that there is ever going to be a way of dealing with the issue of good artists being bad people.

An Impresario of the Landscape by Stephen Heyman at Lapham's Quarterly. This is an introduction to Louis Bromfield, whose home, Malabar Farm, I visited on vacation. It focuses mainly on him as a conservationist. I have so many thoughts about this guy.

This is Why So Many Bars, Restaurants and Coffee Shops Look the Same Across the World by Charlie Brown at Rooted.  It's because social media has flattened taste. I wonder if other types of media do it, too. But the whole concept of "flattening taste" was new to me. 

Humor

Blurbs Beyond Books by Adam Bertocci at Points in Case. This is a fantastic piece for those of us who really dislike blurbs.

I Thought I Would Have Accomplished A Lot More Today And Also By The Time I Was Thirty-five by Alex Baia at The New Yorker. This is hysterical. I started laughing out loud when I got to "Shit. I'm actually forty-one." And then I felt guilty for having laughed at this suffering narrator. And then I laughed some more.

Humor and pain I’m So Lucky I’m an Adult So I Can Do Whatever I Want by Lisa Hides at Frazzled.

"What About the Cat?" Feedback From an Online Writing Workshop by Helen Raica-Klotz at Brevity Blog.  How funny you find this will be determined by how many writers' workshops/critique groups you've been part of.