I’d better start with a warning. This is going to be a long one so if you’re short on time, leave it for your next visit. As you know if you have been following my Dear Friends letters, they don’t come as frequently as they should; you’ll have plenty of time to read this one in the future.
That’s why I’ve never even considered a blog. One has to be prepared to blog every few days, telling readers all about one’s thoughts and events in one’s life. And one must be convinced that those thoughts and events are of great enough importance to merit being written down. Sigh. By the time one reaches one’s eighth decade one realizes generally not enough happens every two or three days and there are very few thoughts and events in one’s life that are of that great importance. Looking back in the Archive, I realize that I get to a Dear Friends letter about twice a year. That would never do for a blog.
So, that’s settled. No blogs. But I do have two substantial pieces of news. The paperback version of BY SLANDEROUS TONGUES came out in January and the hardcover AND LESS THAN KIND will be published in April of this year. I hope you will read KIND and enjoy it, but I personally have a love/hate relationship with that book. It’s a good book, an interesting book, and I think it rounds out Elizabeth’s early life successfully; however, AND LESS THAN KIND took a lot out of me. I don’t think I realized how much effort I expended on the book until it was finished and sent off to my coauthor.
My last Dear Friends letter mentions that I had begun work on a fifth Magdalene and Bell book. That was way back in July and I am not much forwarder now, in February. First I discovered in myself a vast reluctance to tell my agent that I was working on the book or to send her a proposal for it so she could try to place it with a publisher. It soon occurred to me that, although I didn’t want a vacation, I wanted to have something to write, I did not want another deadline. And then, in October, it became necessary to put down the dear little dog that is shown in the photo on my Home Page.
Taffy was sixteen years old and life had become too hard for her. My husband and I would gladly have clung to her longer, but she was having one little stroke after another, losing her ability to walk, even losing recognition of where she was. We had to let her go. For both of us, her absence left a large, gaping hole in our lives.
Ordinarily we would have filled it at once with a young and mischievous puppy. This does not diminish memory of the beloved lost pet, but it does keep one too busy to see the lost one whisking around a corner, or “sleeping” just out of sight, causing a dreadful pang when the realization comes that such a sighting is impossible.
We could not do it. My husband and I did not feel it would be fair to buy a puppy, which would almost certainly outlive us and have its life disrupted when we could no longer care for it. We decided to adopt an older dog. Finding one was not as simple as we expected. Lafayette is big-dog country; the shelter had plenty of labs and goldens and mixtures of those breeds, but not one terrier or terrier-sized dog could we find.
On the internet through Petfinders, we did, at last, discover Zoe and a delightful find she is. Zoe is five years old, a Scottie (remember Fa-La, President Roosevelt’s dog?), one of the short-legged terriers. Now a month after taking her into our home, I am finally getting over the shock of her appearance, but appearance is not why we adopted her. She is sweet and loving and funny, and she was very well behaved when we got her, too. I regret to report that my husband and I are managing to undermine her excellent training at an accelerated rate and making her as spoiled as ever Taffy was. (Zoe is pretty smart; she knows on which side of the bread the butter is.) The reason there is, as yet, no picture of Zoe is not because we don’t love her, just that it is very hard to get a picture of a hairy black dog that doesn’t show up as a featureless blob.
So, little by little I am coming back into focus. All that time after AND LESS THAN KIND was finished, after we made the bitter decision about Taffy, after we enjoyed the happy experience of taking Zoe into our lives ... I have myself felt like a blurred photograph. I found it very difficult to fix on anything. BISHOP TO KING, CHECK! crept forward by lines, by half pages. It was not that I couldn’t write, that I sat with a blank screen in front of me, I couldn’t keep my mind firmly on anything. I would write a few lines, then pick up a book and read or think about what I would make for dinner ... I was out of focus.
My poor webmistress who has been working on a new look for my website has been asking for input in vain. I wasn’t clear on exactly what I wanted and I never sent her the material she needed. Then, in the middle of last week, for no reason at all, everything snapped back. I finished the chapter in BISHOP TO KING, CHECK! that I had been working on for a month and started a new chapter. When my webmistress wrote that she needed text for the pages for BY SLANDEROUS TONGUES (which came out in paperback in January) and AND LESS THAN KIND (to be published in April), I got the material to her in three days. I think I am all together again .... but I won’t promise another Dear Friends letter too soon and THERE WILL BE NO BLOGS.
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