Hello 2025

Yesterday I received a notice that a piece of mine has been accepted for publication. Great news! A good start to the new year. It’s a piece that I still feel is well written, eight or nine months after I first started sending it out, which is not always true. It’s a creative non-fiction piece, so it’s acceptance tells me that not only can I sell flash fiction, but I seem to be able to sell semi-memoir-ish pieces with some consistency as well. It’s going to be placed in what seems to be a quiet respectable publication, and the editor is treating the piece and I with respect. I appreciate all this. So what’s the down side? Why am I not telling you it’s title and it’s destination?

Well, I’m having second thoughts about some of it. There are bits that feel a bit intimate, and I’m now struck by fears I might not be quite ready to put it out there.

But I’m still putting it out there. I am trying to trust past me’s bravery and I have accepted the magazine’s publication proposal. Sometime in the next few months, I will see this piece published. And people will be able to read it.

I hope they will enjoy it.

But I’m not, right this second, prepared to promote it. Hopefully I will get over this shyness by the time it is actually out there. Have you had a similar experience? What did you do?

In other writing news, I am two-thirds of the way through the second edit of my cookbook-guidebook now.

I continue to anticipate the publication of a poem in Pinhole Poetry – hopefully by next week. I was invited to answer some interview questions as well, which was fun.

I’ve been dealing with a gnarly head cold since shortly after new years, so I haven’t started anything new, but I’m on the mend now and am enjoying a bit of brain storming.

I’ve read a couple of books so far this year, and have less than a hundred pages left to read in Nick Harkaway’s Karla’s Choice. Nick Harkaway is John le Carre’s son, and this is a book that fits into the le Carre world, I have also recently watched 1965’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold which “happens” right before the events in Karla’s Choice. (It’s a good movie, I recommend it also.)

It’s been at least a decade and likely more like 15 years since I’ve read any of the actual le Carre novels, and I remember them being difficult and not particularly enjoyable – but I’m enjoying Karla’s Choice. Is this because I’ve done some maturing as a reader over the past decade and a half+ or is it because Harkaway is better at writing for a reader of my generation, or some combination of these two possibilities? It doesn’t really matter. I’m delaying reading the finale because I’m enjoying guessing what will happen. I don’t remember if any of the secondary characters are still around for the le Carre books that come after this one – so my guessing is likely more wild than that of le Carre fans who know what happens later on in the sequence into which this new novel is placed.

Before I caught this cold, I cracked open a “Mose’s Detective Agency” model kit I’ve had waiting assembly for awhile, and I’ve so far managed to get two of three “walls” up and papered. They say it should only take about ten hours to complete. We’ll see. I hope to adjust some of the props, and maybe my version won’t be “Mose’s” at all. I poked at it a bit last night and might try and get the third wall up today.

And tonight, I plan to make up some fried tofu pasta primavera for a meatless Tuesday supper.

Wishing you all health, happiness, and many wonderful words

• a somewhat sniffly Kilmeny