National Book Award Nominees

No genre writers here, but some good reading.

Fiction
Roberto Bolano, 2666
Marilynne Robinson, Home
Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project
M. Glenn Taylor, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart
Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kittredge

Nonfiction
Dexter Filkins, The Forever War
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side
Allan Lichtman, White Protestant Nation
George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations Since 1776


Other categories are biography, memoir, children's literature and what have you. Love that "what have you" category.

Last night I was making a final, final pass through Festival Madness, coming up to the exciting conclusion, when I discovered and I had written in an 8 day week. Two Thursdays, each with important events. Holy Freakin' Crap! How did I manage that?

Did some slight of hand with moving some events to an afternoon, some to the next morning, and pouf! seven days a week. I'm still chopping out words, 2,000 + so far this pass, down maybe 7,000 from when the novel was completed. Yowza! No fun in that at all, but I'm always amazed at the fact that I actually wrote this, and that is seems to be a good read, and that I get so caught up in the story toward the end that I forget to look for words to cut. How can this be? I mean, I wrote it. Why does it still seem exciting?

Heap big mystery.

We fed the cows yesterday, and poor Iris. who granted, is sometimes a bully, had a gore wound in her side. Wonder if the farmer knows. The cows, who had no hay, were so happy to see us, and I had half a loaf of bread (better than none, ha! ha!) and two big bags of fruit and veggie scraps. Yum!

The bottom fell out of the fullest bag and I can to scrabble around in the icy snow to retrieve the goodies.

Love those cows.

Grapeshot