It's a new year now, and here in Eagle County winter break was not *nearly* long enough...but today was a rare and coveted Snow Day! How can one not feel better on a snow day? If nothing else, the overpowering wave of skier euphoria is sweeping westward on the breeze (at least I think that's skier euphoria...guess it could be weed, too).
Anyway, I'm not paying attention to the horribleness today. I'm paying attention to the snow day. The snow forts, the gingersnaps, the hot chocolate, the magical childhood moments, the practicing of the One-Eyebrowed-Glare-of-Motherly-Disdain because so help me if these kids don't get out of the house and run off some energy we may none of us see tomorrow...
Luckily, the part of my brain that filters out background noise has quadrupled in size and efficiency since giving birth to boys, and also I happened to have a library copy of 2016's Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy burning a hole on my desk, so I read some things. The only writer I knew in the whole thing was Kelly Link, because obviously, and her story The Game of Smash and Recovery was weird and lovely, high science fiction (and here is my disclaimer that I have not completely gone over to the dark side yet, that the force of my English Lit background remains strong, and that thereby stories featuring sentient spaceships as protagonists have to work twice as hard for me to like them half as well)(yes I am a bigot; fortunately there are writers like Kelly Link to help me overcome my personal shortcomings), but deliberate and artistic too, and she does good work. Also there was The Mushroom Queen by a writer named Liz Ziemska; what happens when an unhappy wife, mid-dissatisfying-marriage, contemplates leaving but is instead subsumed into the underground mycelium web? It was every bit as weird as it sounds, but also real and excellent, and there was evil fungus and a really great dog. I had to read it twice.
Before all this I'd been reading On Writing by Mr. Stephen King Himself, a guy whose work I haven't read in probably twenty years (though at Eric's suggestion I should probably check out The Green Mile and Shawshank Redemption) (and he *did* write Hearts in Atlantis - I wasn't wrong about that!). Great book. Direct, entertaining, full of quotable one-liners and unfussy pointers on getting words on paper without sounding like a buffoon.
So that's what.