I already knew about Jones' book, but somehow the enticements on his site didn't quite entice me enough to buy.

Well, this time, some of the comments in the rant caught my attention, especially a comparison someone made between Ginny Good and Angela's Ashes. Well, I loved Angela's Ashes. I read it cover to cover in a couple of days--I couldn't put it down--so this analogy (it wasn't so much a comparison as a comment that referenced Angela's Ashes) piqued my interest. I decided to give Ginny Good a try. Therein lay my first dilemma.

Decisions, Decisions. Ginny Good is available on Amazon for under $12. The other option is to buy it from Gerard's site for $25 (which includes shipping). For a paperback from an author I haven't yet read (and might not like), that's a big difference. I couldn't decide whether to buy the cheaper copy so I would have enough money to buy another book as well, or whether to spring for the signed copy from the author.

Then I thought about how hard it was for Jones to get published in the first place. At least he said he'd had a hard time on his site and it didn't sound like he was exactly rolling in greenbacks (unless you count any lawn clippings he may have picked up on the golf green). So, I ordered a copy from the author. I know how hard it is to make money promoting your own book and I figure he could use the extra few dollars and I, in turn, would get a signed copy.

Well, my copy of Ginny Good came last week, but I couldn't get to the post office for a couple of days to pick it up (I had it sent c/o a PO Box--a habit I've picked up when buying from the Web), so I didn't really have it in hand until a couple of days ago.

Well, it was my intention to put Ginny Good on my mile-high to-read stack. I wasn't giving it lower priority, I simply have a big stack of great books I can't wait to read and I've just picked up Franzen's The Corrections with the intention of reading it before starting on any other books (it's a big book). Well, that's not completely true. I'm partway through a YA book and a small literary novel, but Franzen's is going to be the main book I'm reading, so Ginny Good was going to have to wait a few weeks. Or so I thought.

Judging a Book. Oh, before I tell you what happened next, let me give you my honest reaction to the Ginny Good cover. My reaction was "ehh." In other words, not very enthusiastic. I assumed from the cover that this was a story about some elderly woman who was of no particular interest to me who was pushing up daisies. I guess maybe it's intended to be a nod to "flower power" but I really think it would have been better to have a picture of a young woman's eyes looking over the flower from behind the petals or maybe a woman's face superimposed upon the center of the blossom. This would tell readers it's a human interest book, not a book about meditation or growing daisies or something along those lines. The cover kind of grows on you, but that's not the purpose of a cover. The purpose of a cover is to immediately signal to the reader the subject matter of the book. This book is about people, not about flowers. Anyway, back to my narrative...

Quick Preview. I couldn't resist just taking a peek at the first page of Ginny Good, even though I had decided not to read it right away. I often do this before committing books to the to-read stack. Before I knew it, I was onto the second page. Then I backtracked. I have to backtrack in my story too.

My sweetheart was cooking that evening. He had a culinary experiment he wanted to try--he told me to kick back while he did some incantations in the kitchen. I was more than willing to kick back. I work long hours and cooking is not at the top of my list after a long work day. Well, what happened was that something caught my attention in the first few paragraphs so I went back to the beginning and read a few paragraphs out loud. My sweetheart turned around and smiled. Then I started reading to myself again and he said, "No, keep reading."

He's never done that before (we often read snippets to each other but then we go back to reading to ourselves).

Well, he was cooking dinner, so how could I say "no?" I continued reading out loud and realized I was enjoying the story as much as he. My sweetheart kept laughing and listening while he was cooking and said "Keep reading" every time I paused for breath. The next thing I knew, I had read three chapters and dinner was ready. We enjoyed a late dinner together and afterwards we both looked at the book and at each other and said together, "Keep reading." So I picked up Ginny Good and read another couple of chapters before my voice gave out for the evening.

Hooked. That's how it started and you know what? The next day my sweetheart and I both had to work, so I couldn't just pick up Ginny Good where I left off the night before--but I wanted to. Yup. I kept wondering what was going to happen next. There was The Corrections sitting on the gramophone and a YA novel on the coffee table and the slender literary novel on the dining room table, yet Ginny Good was on the couch, beckoning. I was tempted to read ahead and then backtrack when my sweetheart showed up after work, but that didn't seem fair. I restrained myself--besides I had work to do too. When my sweetie arrived, I read three more chapters out loud while he happily listened and cooked me another dinner.

So now I'm writing in my blog, but what I really want to do is read more Ginny Good. It's really difficult to wait until this evening. I love page turners. I've read only a handful of page-turners in my life. Whatever you might think about the literary content of a book, there is a special something to a book you can't put down. Ginny Good is a brash book, an unapologetic Gerard-has-one-hell-of-a-big-chip-on-his-shoulder book, but it's a page-turner, at least so far. It's going to take a few more nights to read it, since I can only read it out loud for an hour or so each evening, but I'll let you know what I think when I'm done and whether the story holds up through the rest of the book. --- Mya

Oh well, there's no use arguing with my body. I have my agenda, it has its agenda. Sometimes we have disagreements and my body usually wins. So, since I was wide awake, I decided to do something useful, like editing. I sat down at the desktop computer and worked on chapter seven of my second novel. After about an hour, I moved to the laptop I use for cruising the Web (the desktop computer that holds my manuscripts is not linked to the Internet for reasons of hacker paranoia). It was still dark, but at least the birds were beginning to chirp.

Time passed, the dawn started creeping through the trees to the east and I moved back into my writing corner and buried myself in my manuscript for another three hours, with a couple of short breaks.

A Baker's Double-Dozen. At 8:18, when I was using the laptop (which is near the window), I heard a funny sound. It was kind of an eh eh, eh eh sound. My first thought was that it sounded like a Canada goose, except that the sound was shorter, sharper, and higher pitched. I hurried out to the deck and looked around. The light was beautiful. The morning sun was glistening on the undersides of the clouds. I had that serene and eery feeling I sometimes get right after an unexpected spring shower, but I couldn't see any birds. Occasionally the Canada geese will cross over on their flight between the ocean beaches and a nearby lake, but not often--only once every three or four years or so, so I looked in the direction of the trees to the west--and saw nothing (except trees). Then I looked around the neighborhood. Still nothing. Oh well. I started to go back in the house when suddenly I heard it again, eh eh, eh eh, almost right above me! Here I was trying to find birds and I had looked in every direction except up! Sadly, the flock was already a couple of blocks away before I spotted it (instead of looking up, I was, like an imbecile, staring at the trees).

Well, even at that distance (and they were fast disappearing) it was a spectacular sight. Like a dunce, I had forgotten to take the camera outside with me (dumb, dumb), so I had to run in to grab it and hurry back outside. The picture at the left doesn't even begin to convey the beauty of those shimmering, glistening white feathers and the coordinated, graceful movement of the birds. They were magnificent. Unfortunately, by the time I fumbled on the power switch, adjusted the zoom lens and aimed the camera, they were a couple of miles away and then the darned autofocus wouldn't focus.

Precious Seconds Lost. I couldn't really blame the camera for missing my National Geographic moment. How was it supposed to focus on white birds against white clouds? The birds were now about four miles away. They were small, very small (even with a 200mm lens) and the clouds behind them were indistinct enough that the camera was confused. The zoom lens decided to do morning aerobics in-out-breathe, in-out-breathe without stopping between breaths to focus. I was getting frantic. By now the birds were almost five miles away and I was despairing of getting any kind of picture at all. Finally, in desperation, I aimed the camera at some wintering trees (I knew the exposure would be wrong, but at this point I didn't care) and then tried to locate the birds again in the viewfinder and fired off a couple of shots. The birds were moving fast. In the first shot, shown here, you can make out their basic shape (and the fact that the wingtips aren't black like a snow goose). In the second shot (not shown), they aren't much bigger than dots.

I'm glad I was sitting at the laptop rather than the desktop computer or I wouldn't have heard them. They only called out a couple of times. It's the only time I've ever seen migrating swans on the wing (which shows how far removed we are from nature). I'm assuming for the moment that these were swans (even though they sounded more like geese) because they were large and completely white. They weren't whistling swans, I don't think, unless whistling swans also make an eh-eh sound. I don't suppose they could be albatrosses (which are also large and white). They look partly gray in the picture, but that's where their bodies are casting shadows on the wings with the sun still low in the sky.

On another subject, it was a good day for me today, writing-wise. Not only did I get a whole new set of pages written, but I did quite a bit of editing as well. I think the productivity must be because I have more energy in the spring--Mother Nature's hormone infusion. Well, I'm not complaining.

Rats!! Yikes. This evening I went to put more food in Nabokov's feeder and noticed the rat cage next to the cat dish had been tripped. I assumed the cat had bumped it, but when I lifted the cage to retrigger it, I was surprised to discover a little gray rat inside. I was so surprised. Was this the rat that had been stealing my quilt batting, defecating in the garage, chewing holes in the cat food bags and clambering inside the walls chewing on the 2x4s in the middle of the night? I wasn't sure. Strangely, the rat seemed to be sleeping. When I poked it, it didn't wake. That's when I realized little Mr. Whiskers was dead even though I spent a bunch of money buying a live cage instead of a leg trap.

But the rat died, even though there was still food in the cage (I used cat food and peanut butter to bait the cage) and the rat hadn't been in the cage more than a day at most (I had just checked it and reset it the day before). I couldn't understand why it was dead or what had killed it, so I assumed the worst (disease) and got a plastic bag to pick up and dispose of the rat without touching it. --- Mya

Ah well, so much for good intentions. I was going to take it to the woods and let it go. That's why I bought a $35 live trap instead of a $2 cruel leg/neck trap. So I put the rat to rest and baited the trap again in case the mother rat (and perhaps more baby rats) are still hanging around in the walls (I think they get in through the attic vent holes and it seems that they can chew through anything). Hopefully this was the only rat, but you never know... --- Mya

Why not just forget about it and not include them? Because they add up. Boy, do they add up. All those small basic expenses, not including conferences and travel, work out to about $2,000 a year. To not deduct these would be foolhardy, unless I want to be considered a charitable patron of the IRS (which I don't).

So here I sit, when I want to be writing, entering $$$ into a database so the computer can give me an accurate total. Well, hopefully I'll be done soon. Yesterday I wrote instead of working on taxes, so I guess I'll end up doing taxes on the weekend.

Being a full-time writer is also an endurance event. There's no regular paycheck, you have to be seven people wrapped up in one (secretary, marketing manager, accountant, writer, reader, archivist, etc.) and even if you have several books in print, there's no guarantee that a publisher will take the next book. Even if the book is accepted, there's no guarantee that it will sell. And even if it sells, there's no guarantee it will sell enough copies to earn out the advance. So, yes, it takes incredible persistence, optimism, and fortitude to do this kind of work. Or so I thought, until I watched Endurance on DVD last night.

I may have to reassess my concept of endurance.