Item One

I survived Brownies. It was exactly as overwhelming as the last time I was there, at age seven. But, they gave me a badge.

Item Two

I’ve been reading this zero-waste blog lately and feeling even more guilty than usual about our consumption levels. So when my sister sent me a Facebook post about freezing vegetable scraps for a few weeks, then dumping the mix into a slow cooker and creating vegetable stock, I thought I’d give it a try. My mom said, “Oh, that reminds me of being a kid. There was always a pot of soup on the back of the stove and you could throw almost anything in.”

All very idyllic. In theory.

This is what my vegetable broth tasted like:

It tasted like compost soup. Because… wait… it was compost soup.

Item Three

One of my proposals was rejected yesterday. When I told my daughter, she said, “If at first you don’t like your food, fry, fry again.”

Which was strangely helpful.

May your days be Brownie, compost-soup, and rejection free. I’m off to do more frying…

My daughter over the holidays (having just scooped up a book sent by a publisher as a present for me), said, “you’ve had a great writing year.”

“Just a normal year,” I said.

But she disagreed, and began listing various things I’d done in 2015. She’d been paying attention, apparently, and she has a frighteningly good memory.

By the time she was through, I was forced to agree that it had been a great year. Which made me think that too often, we spend our time looking for the next accomplishment. I’ll feel like a success once I have a book published. I’ll feel like a success once I’m offered a bigger advance. I’ll feel like a success once I have an agent. Of course, as soon as we have any of these things, we immediately look to the next.

So, before making any resolutions this year, I suggest we take the advice of my 11-year-old, and spend a few moments celebrating the accomplishments of 2015. We probably all achieved more than we remember.

THEN, we pop the champagne. Happy old year, all, and happy new!

I have been enjoying those idyllic days between delivering a manuscript and receiving the editing changes. The days during which all my writing seems perfect and my hours stretch gloriously free.

During this break, I have been writing self-indulgent nonsense which will likely never be published; crafting Christmas presents; baking; losing Words with Friends games against my mother and sister; reading; playing tennis; and even… hemming curtains (I know. Crazy. It’s as if my body’s been invaded by an alien imposter.)

I have to take advantage of these days because my next couple weeks are booked solid with school presentations and at some point during those weeks, there’s going to be a clunk in my inbox. An editor will have read my manuscript and discovered that my writing is not-at-all perfect.

Winter is coming.

(That was really nerdy, wasn’t it? That last line? I told you… alien imposter.)