On a Scale of One to Ten

Recalling the Tsunami, Katrina, Iraq and all the big ugly disasters that we face makes my little publishing woes seem like the proverbial (cliche alert!!!) tempest in a teapot. Tantrum in a teapot? Taken in with the global warming crisis, when even Bush is ready to take action about the polar bear's decline, I feel rather sheepish. Baaa!

On the other hand, I'm not having a 2 day, $250,000 wedding (my guess) at a fancy Boston hotel on New Year's Eve. Nope. And I didn't talk about anybody's sex life in great detail on this blog. Had I done so, probably would have had a sh__load of hits. Nope, Grapeshot is frugal and discrete. Always puts a dollar in the Salvation Army bucket.

I'm starting (to read) a new novel. Measuring the World. Notice it begins with a big conflict. Even good literary novelists know about that. Have to tweak World of Mirrors beginning one more time. Then both of these books I'm trying to sell go off to publishers, not agents. Coming down (another cliche alert! ) the home stretch with Festival Madness. Got the team to the Adirondacks. Now for some action. This writing business is hard hard hard.

This is a season for sadness, sentiment and summing up. The predictions in the papers for the New Year are always codswallop! We are actually looking for a prediction of some snow. That simple. A small guest from the South would li ke to put on the new gloves and give her little snow shovel a work out. The cats could look out the window from their new kitchen perch in what counts for awe in cat. The cows would be brown and black and cream blobs on a field on white. They like snow. I could make a big pot of soup and get out the jigsaw puzzle we never got around to last winter.

So: sadness, which comes from remembering the past and all those now gone, sentiment, the feelings that come with remembrance, and summing up, what counts, what doesn't, and how to proceed. Life can be simple, but it almost never is.

Grapeshot