people stew

It often happens like this: I'm finishing up a manuscript, getting ready to send it out into the big world with it's still-moist wings and focusing on keeping myself hopeful. Meanwhile, there's a crockpot full of other ideas...things strangers are saying, thoughts and memories these strangers are having...simmering in another part of my brain, distracting me a little from the task at hand. But I don't want to unplug the crockpot. I don't want to throw out its contents. Instead, I press the lid down - gently but firmly - hoping nothing escapes for just a little while longer.

I finish releasing the new bird, my most recent baby, and then I turn to back the crockpot, which is by now threatening to boil over. Carefully, carefully I lift the lid and peer inside, giving a little bit more attention to what's being said and who's saying it - what's being thought and who's thinking it. Getting to know the strangers inside.

Sounds a little grotesque, I know. Like, what is she talking about? People in a crockpot? Ew. Such a rash, blatant mixing of metaphors! Birds, horses, boiling people? Gimme a break!

And yet, I don't know how to explain the process of letting go of one book and starting another any better than that. Not yet anyway

Today's note to self:
Be ridiculously optimistic.
And stand up straight.Follow @nicole_mcinnes

was seriously blessed

to spend this past weekend in some of the prettiest parts of SoCal, like Pasadena and Malibu, where I attended an amazing wedding. Good people, good food and good ceremony (not to mention dancing like a crazed 16-year-old to Cyndi Lauper, Journey, and Hava Nagila) were just what the doctor ordered. It's good to be reminded these days - when so much of the news we all hear is bleak and dour - that simple things, like a young couple, aloft in chairs on their wedding night, starting a new life together under the watchful and tearfully joyful eyes of the families that nurtured them, are what matter most. (Was that a run-on sentence, or am I just up typing too late?) Actually, the older I get, the more I think that those are the kinds of things that matter at all, really.

It's always good to be home, though, even if it means I'll be knee-deep in last-minute novel editing until the end of the month and teaching until the Christmas season offers a break.

It's okay, though. It's all good.

I am exhausted by work and kids, and love and responsibility. But mostly, like I said, I am blessed.Follow @nicole_mcinnes