Dear Readers,
For the past few months
I've felt mainly exhausted--from one long year of focusing on book publicity and from eight long years of kids in high school, which thankfully came to a happy end this week. My youngest took his last AP exam on Friday and graduates in three weeks. That should free up some energy, right? Oh, and my hip ailment still plagues me and has me running from one doc to another, which is also a drag. Currently I've embarked on a round of focused physical therapy, so plans for a hip arthroscopy are
on hold, and if I'm lucky, I won't need the surgery after all.
However, this past week things started moving again, and I got out of the creative doldrums. Why? Because I heeded a call for submissions by Jewess Magazine, asking for conversion stories in time for Shavout (the current Jewish holiday
when it is customary to read the Book of Ruth about the most famous convert to Judaism). I can definitely supply such a story, so I finally wrote a new piece, and it was published last week:
I hope I
can remind myself, the next time I'm in a creative slump, that to get out of it, you just have to push yourself. It was indeed hard to write that article, not because I didn't know what to say, but because I was dragging. My creative output engine was sputtering and needed to be driven to get out the kinks.
Remember I was heading to Boston end of April? Well, I did get to experience the Public Garden in spring but we mainly had nasty cold and rainy weather, so the "funnest" part of that Part of my exhaustion comes from the fact that life as an author means playing the long game. Whenever I am about to run out of stamina, something awesome happens to keep me going. I found that to be true again last week when I spent a
fun evening meeting with a book group, and my event spreadsheet told me that I had first contacted them last February. It took 15 months, several follow-ups and touch points to make that get-together happen but it was worth it.
It is so validating to find that a book is a connector. It's a lovely thing to realize that by authoring a book you're giving people a reason to come
together, to talk to each other, and it also connects you, the author. At two recent events I had the added pleasure of reconnecting with women I had lost touch with but whom I had known pretty well years ago, and so it was an extra bonus to spot a friendly face in an audience of strangers. Jumping Over Shadows in Finalist in Relationships-Nonfiction
Reisauflauf (Rice Pudding) Good things also tend to happen when you're productive and putting stuff out there, and so it happened that I received the email with the news of the award while I was assembling my latest blog post featuring My Grandmother's Rice Pudding Recipe (Reisauflauf). It's one of my kids' favorite meals, and it works well for the current Jewish holiday of Shavuot, plus it is really easy to make (as all my grandmother's recipes
are).
This brings me to the end of this installment of the newsletter. I hope you're enjoying spring wherever on this globe you find yourself, and with that I wish you a resurgence of energy and fresh ideas as well.
Happy spring!
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