Big news – the audiobook is now uploaded to Audible; they will take up to 30 days to check it out and release it. More excitement – another launch to come!
Receiving feedback from readers, very gratifying:
Jane Anderson: Finished your book and loved it right to the last page. I will post a review and have already talked it up with my friends. Congratulations, your best yet!
Curtis Barlow: A beautiful, funny, poignant chronicle of experience. Highly recommended. Great writer, great story.
Nick Rice: I finished the book tonight. I adored it; I didn’t want it to end. Tell me more.
Rita Davies: I’ve read Loose Woman with great pleasure. The writing is lovely. It’s entertaining, poignant, funny and moving.
Thank you, dear readers, how good to hear! Had a wonderful experience today – I stopped at Ben McNally’s new bookstore on Adelaide St. East to pick up Hamnet and Judith. While I was there, he said, “Your book is here – why don’t you sign it?” They’d brought it in to send to some lovely person. So I signed my book. Please, support this fantastic store as they struggle to stay alive. And THANK YOU TO THOSE WHO DO AND HAVE!
An article in the new New Yorker: “Starving Artists: how can we pay for creativity in the digital age?” The answer is: We can’t.
“We have arrived at a situation in which it’s easier than ever to share your creativity with the world, and harder than ever to make a living doing so. (William Deresiewicz in his book The Death of the Artist) interviewed roughly a hundred and forty writers, musicians, visual artists, and filmmakers about their experiences working in the so-called ‘creative economy.’ Most spend a disproportionate amount of their time effectively running a small business, focussing on winning the attention war through ‘the overlapping trio of self-marketing, self-promotion, and self-branding.'”
Absolutely true, sad to say. That’s what I’m doing right now – rather than starting my next book, I’m trying to promote this one, though I am hopeless at all 3 of those things above. As are most of us. Disheartening.
But just a walk through this city reminds me how incredibly lucky I am. As I wrote a few weeks ago, there are tents everywhere and people lined up at shelters and food banks. My son says they’re wondering if their bar, opened not long ago, will have to shut again as the second wave hits.
And yet – there were children going to school today, what a joyful sight, masked and all. It’s a perfect mild day, though the nights are getting colder. I made pesto with my garden basil and will have it tonight with the fresh wild sole I just bought at the St. Lawrence Market, a cornucopia of goodness where I also bought peaches and blueberries, hot bagels right out of the wood-burning brick oven, French cheese.
Should I feel guilty about my extreme good fortune, when others are suffering so? Is it enough that I am grateful every minute and take nothing for granted?
