:: My writing partner and I spent 5 full days, from sun up till way after sun down only doing one thing: revising our novel projects. We were fiercely focused.
Something Small
I had a pen case, a round tube of turquoise fabric with a zipper across the top, that served me all through graduate school, law school, work, graduate school again, and work again. Like, for more than 15 years. I loved that damn pen case. Then the zipper broke last week. I actually considered replacing the zipper.
Then I decided: Pen case, you’ve served me well, go on to the great pen case prairie and carry no more pens.
Since I’m not currently in Tokyo, the last place where I saw respectable pen cases, I went online to find a new one. Knowing that I have long, monogamous relationships with my pen cases, I knew my new pen case had to have very specific qualities.
People, I found my new pen case soul mate.
This Paperthinks case cost a little more than I was expecting to spend on a new pen case. But on balance, it had great features. See above image:
- Big, chunky zipper—less likely to break.
- Blissful turquoise color—easy to find in my bag.
- Long enough (Lamy pen provided for scale), but not too long.
- Unzipped fully, it lies open flat—no digging around in the dark recesses of the pen case.
- Recycled leather fabric, so it’s sturdy and likely to retain any leaked ink in time for me to rescue the situation from tragedy inside my bag.
On a scale of 1 (pens jambling around in bottom of your bag) to 5 (accio pen), this pen case is a 4.5, losing .5 star just on account of the price. Otherwise it is perfect.
Something Big
All this talk of pens and pen cases and such has got me thinking of writing and writing and holy bananas people I sold my novel to a publisher and it’s coming out this summer WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT.
Here’s what happened.
In January, one of my fiction-writing soulmates, LF, came to my home for an in-house writing retreat. Obviously, we didn’t do much writing in my home because toddlers. Instead, we found nooks all over Chapel Hill. She wrote about our antics on her blog. We spent 5 full days, from sun up till way after sun down only doing one thing: revising our novel projects. We were fiercely focused.
After LF left to go back home to the mountains (jealous), I compiled a list of publishers and submitted to five. Two accepted. I chose the one that was the best fit.
And here we are. Sounds easy. It. was. not.
The book is called ENTANGLEMENT. I’ll post updates on here now and then about it’s progress. You can to read some of the short stories I’ve published in the past, or my current essays and other journalism.
