Five for Friday

The sun is finally shining here, after having disappeared into grey clouds before Christmas. Seriously. No sunshine in Houston for almost a month. But today it's peeking it's head out. Hooray for that!

A quick five today.

1. Finishing It Wasn't Always Like This and fascinatingly, it's the 40th anniversary of Tuck Everlasting this year… which is relevant because IWALT is Tuck Everlasting meets Veronica Mars. A girl, a boy, a fountain of youth, and what happens when you're stuck at 17.

The big question driving the book being: Would you want to live forever? Not as a supernatural being like a vampire but as just you? And if you did want that, would you want to be forever seventeen? And if you and your true love-- also seventeen-- were parted by crazy circumstances….

That's all I'll say for now except writing this book has been a wild and wonderful ride and I can hardly wait to talk about more later this year!

2. Reading the next in Maggie Stiefvater's Raven Boy series: Blue Lily, Lily Blue. Holy cow, she can write. I've said that here many times, but it always bears repeating. Her way with words is phenomenal and brilliant and I can't turn those e-reader pages fast enough.

3. Got to hear an excerpt from the equally brilliant Jennifer Mathieu's forthcoming DEVOTED last nite.  We were appearing at a fund raiser for Montgomery County Literacy Volunteers and so we were reading from our forthcoming novels (which meant that I read chapter one of FINDING PARIS!) and in any case, oooh! DEVOTED! About a girl who's been raised in this ultra-fundamentalist family (think Duggar family only more so) and begins to wonder about the outside world and what she really wants in life. It's a theme that's fascinated me for a long time--and one that's been written about in a variety of religions (even something like Potok's My Name is Asher Lev-- which has been turned into a stage play currently running here in Houston). I am sooo looking forward to this book!

4. And in all things TV, I'm finishing up season one of Transparent and if you are not watching this show, get Amazon Prime and watch this show. Have dipped my toes into Broad City and I think this Jezebel article -- which quotes from a Slate article-- covers some of my thoughts about its fascinating and awful and cringeworthy and weirdly fierce characters. And of course, RHOBH is in full swing and Brandy has been crazier than usual, tossing wine in Eileen's face for NO REASON AT ALL. (I have a whole treatise on this in my head, but I'm on deadline, so another time) Plus the waiting game for the new season of House of Cards (Frank and Claire = the Macbeths on steroids) and you know it's almost time for Blacklist to come back… Okay if I keep up this list you will say how do you have a life? And possibly that's a good question except I really do.

5. Mostly, I'm still riding on the wonderful high of a 3 nite writing retreat with awesome writers in the wilds of LaGrange, Texas, where we wrote for hours, hiked the icy woods, and ate delicious and generally healthy meals, punctuated by popcorn and chocolate and the occasional glug of wine.

Til next time...