Dear Readers, Just a quickie to tide you over while I assemble sources and thoughts for the next newsletter, on the fragility of our stories.…
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Category: nonfiction
Dear Readers,
Light rain has fallen all day here in 01754 as I write this. More is forecast, and the sun might not come out for the next four days. Once upon a time it would have been snow. I guess I’m thankful for that, as I don’t feel up to shoveling right now.
I hit the Holidaze with a bowel disorder, bookended by Covid—first my wife’s and then mine. When she got it a few days before Christmas, it didn’t lay her entirely low, but it did a number on her travel plans. She had to cancel her flight to Turkey, where she wanted to usher in 2023 with her family, and had to settle for Skyping.
Somehow I avoided picking up her ailment for two weeks, but on New Years Day I tested positive at home. That was weird, because I didn’t feel sick, and still don’t. Not so peppy, but that’s a small price to pay for the honor. Maybe my three boosters helped.
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I’m afraid another month blew by without saying hi to you. And rather than ranting about politics or plugging my book, I’m offering a guest…
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My apologies for not writing in August. Not only was it beastly hot, I was extremely otherwise occupied packing and moving our stuff to a new house.
I knew it was bound to happen and put it off as long as I could, but buckled under rising home prices, mortgages, and peer pressure. It wasn’t the first time my spouse and I had committed to buying property but it was the first time our offer was accepted.
We dithered and negotiated over this and that for seven weeks before biting the debt bullet on a cute little mid-century cape in a modest but up-and-coming mill town 20 miles west of Boston. Sorting and packing and labeling and loading and hauling and unloading and distributing three tons of stuff took more than a month, leaving us with dozens of banana and banker boxes brimming with history to plumb and triage and keep or trash. The banana boxes at least found a good home in the barn of a coop that gleans otherwise wasted crops from local farms and donates them to food pantries and the like.
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Before I forget, Saturday 4/30 is Indie Bookstore day. You may yawn, but it’s a big deal in their struggle for survival. Find a local bookstore and go see what’s happening. Click the poster below to visit a store locator at bookshop.org. Click here to see the full size image. If you have a website or want to send out email about it, copy this section and paste it there.
And while you’re there, why not browse at the Perfidy Press Bookstore. Thinking of adding a shelf called Friends Recommend... with books that you and others I know believe readers would enjoy. It’ll be limited to 10 titles, so don’t delay, send in your faves.
Scooping Book Reviews
Sometimes the magic works.
It isn’t normally possible for an author to get a new book reviewed in print before it goes to galley, which means you’ve got a publisher or you’re publishing it yourself and it’s all typeset. I’m in a pre-publication limbo, and rather than just twiddling my thumbs til my publisher does their thing, I decided to review my novel myself—but not by itself.
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Celebrating Black History Month reminds one that, like Dr. Martin Luther King, too many African Americans enter history before their time, felled by those sworn to serve and protect them. Their murders have fueled civil rights uprisings such as swept the country in June 2020, after police blithely took the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black martyrs. The Black Lives Matter movement these events crystallized may be changing things, but how much it has impacted communities across America is tough to assess, at least for me. I guess you have to be there to know.
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As the year inexorably winds down to the orgies of consumption I sometimes call the holydaze, I find myself unaccountably nostalgic for the “old daze,” when my parents, grandparents, and perhaps an aunt, cousin or guest gathered around the table at my childhood home in Connecticut. Along with my parents and theirs, five of my twelve first cousins have since departed to their final destinations. Of the survivors, one of us lives close at hand and she’ll be with us on Thanksgiving, hopefully with stories. Her mom was a fabulous cook who threw large dinner parties I well remember that I’ll never upstage, even with Peking Duck as our main course. (Don’t ask why. It just happened that way.)
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