Aletheia edit done and gone!

I write this in bed. I am reviewing books, having a look at courses I’ve been invited to teach, waiting on a call-back, and on a submitted story. And did I mention that I’m in bed?

I mean, specifically, bed at 1 pm, surrounded by cords and open laptops and phones and legal pads and my kindle and a stack of other books, including the wonderful Patricide, by D. Foy?

But getting back to my first point. In bed.

When my son was in junior high he and his friends would add, “in bed,” to the end of every sentence. Like the old guy at the pub who does the ‘Said the actress to the bishop.’ So (and thanks TP for the prompt), someone’d say, ‘I hate it when you get here early and you have to wait for Mr. Weiss,’ and the kids’d be all, ‘IN BE-ED!’

That kind of thing. Which is where I am. In bed. Because the edit’s in—and the visionary Ben Baldwin is working on the cover—this is a novel about memory, about a woman who returns home to her lake-town and gets bitten by the beast of memory. I read Borges of course, for inspiration, but also Kandell’s work on memory, more McCarthy (in fact, my agent-angel emailed me after reading a draft and said I am to Gila Monsters what Cormac is to watermelons—bless him) and Bronte and watched and finally abandoned American Horror Story at “Hotel.” My husband stepped up again as beta-reader. My son helped with spread-sheets, concept art, and comments like, ‘novel writing looks really fun.’ And sometime toward the end of the process, one of the people I love most in the world died, and I got shortlisted for a residency and a couple of prizes, and sold a new story, and have been asked to teach at a prestigious workshop and one best friend is miles away across this adopted country of ours, and another lost her job, and a sister went to Spain and tracked Don Quijote for me, and another was at the bedside of the person who died, as he lay dying, and kissed him for me, and he smiled.