Dear Readers,
I hope this summer has begun well for you. Here in the Chicago area it doesn't quite feel like summer yet as it has been raining a lot. We've had only a few days with temperatures above 70F (20C). Instead, we have had lots of rain, which has made the world wonderfully green.
I realize it has been a while since I've sent a proper newsletter. The month of May had me entirely waylaid with the end of the school year. I work for an elementary school and toward the end of the school year, extra
projects always pile up.
May also brought my daughter's graduation from college--the first in our family! While my husband and I both have graduate degrees from the University of Chicago, neither of us went to college in the U.S., so this whole college graduation things was new to us. A rather elaborate occasion, we thought, with lots of ceremony and odd costumes, which at Boston University turned into a rather soggy affair as it poured right before
convocation began:
For our daughter it didn't quite feel like the end of school as she is going on to four years of veterinary school at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul. Still, it was good to celebrate this
milestone.
We took the occasion of all five of us being together for a little trip up the coast and finally visited Acadia National Park. It seems that lately I have been taking more and more trips to see places "I've Always Wanted to See." Acadia National Park is definitely worth a visit, although in my opinion it does not beat the Pacific Northwest in terms of beautiful coastal scenery. For me the biggest deal about this trip was that, ten months after hip surgery, I was able to hike again! (Mind you, I still can't sit without
pain, so the jury is out on whether this whole ordeal was worth it, but that's another story.)
We did a four-hour hike up and down the Gorham Mountain Trail, and by the end of making it through this scree slope I was pretty wiped.
Speaking of "I Always Wanted to" destinations, I finally managed to assemble the photo essays of our trip to Petra, Jordan earlier this year:
With all this travel, work and family stuff, my writing took a hit. At least my photography didn't...
So, in an effort to recreate my ideal writing life, I just joined a co-working space in my Chicago neighborhood to give me that space away from home to hunker down. I hope it will give me the same kind of creative bubble I had in the summer of 2015, when I rewrote the manuscript of Jumping Over Shadows. Having the mornings set aside to strictly work on that project and marching off to an "office" to do it, and then having the rest of the day
for family life, errands and other stuff, all the while knowing that the next day I would have time to write again, proved enormously productive.
I've set about finishing up Book No. 2 and am currently plowing through the feedback from my first beta readers. It is a short (about 20,000 words) how-to on shaping family history into compelling stories. If you're interested in joining the second round of beta readers, please let me know! This should happen later this summer.
Other than that, after much mental back and forth, I've let go of writing book reviews. That'll be one less drag on my writing time. We do have to be more judicious about how we spend our time, don't you think?
With that I wish you a productive summer, but also one with a good amount of time spent with family and good friends and on happy pursuits. Life is too short! (My husband and I have spent the past few days hanging out with a
middle school friend of his, who's visiting from Germany, and it's just been a blast.)
Sincerely,
|
|
|
|
