Song Lyric of the Day:
You never use words you can’t afford / A house of cards and it’s a sign / So wait up / You never get nervous anymore / So wait up / You never get nervous anymore / What did you want me to say?
***
What a crazy couple of days it’s been, huh? Thanks to poor Coraline’s teething pains (tooth #6) Sunday night, Rich and I were still awake when news of Osama Bin Laden’s death first broke across all the TV stations. I’m still processing the news, like trying to make sense of the fact that the monster who physically and emotionally decimated my hometown, the city where I was born, was finally killed almost 10 long years after 9/11. I can’t say I felt joy upon hearing the news, but I certainly felt relief. And a kind of shock that we finally got him. I think it’s impossible for me to feel genuine joy or happiness about it since him being dead won’t bring back any of the thousands of people he killed, won’t make things go back to how they used to be, won’t instantly end wars, won’t return us to a more innocent existence. But it’s certainly a relief.
***
Remember how I finally took the plunge and joined LinkedIn awhile back to start networking in the hopes of landing freelance writing work? Well, I’ve also finally started to deal with the writing monkey on my back. Which is good since you need to write to get published. I put pen to paper, as it were (OK, I typed on my MacBook), and knocked out a personal essay I’ve been wanting to write for a little while now. Rich liked it — he’s a great, supportive hubby that way — and my best friend and fabulously gifted writer Caren also liked it. Caren also gave me invaluable feedback which will help me refine it over the next few days so it’ll be in great shape for submission to the website I’ve got my eye on. Me being a superstitious dork, that’s all I’ll say about it for now. But I feel really good that I finally wrote something besides a blog post — it’s been too long. And in the hopes of real-life networking and general motivation and inspiration to write more, I’m going to go to the monthly Knoxville Writers’ Guild meeting tomorrow night. (If you’re there, I’ll be the quiet one hiding in the back row.) Just the fact that the Guild has the apostrophe in the right place — and that they used an apostrophe at all — warms this word nerd’s heart and gives me confidence that I’ll be around genuine, bona-fide writers. Should be interesting.
Who knows? I might be so inspired by the meeting tomorrow night that I’ll relight the fire under my ass and get back to work on my novel. You know — since I have all the words up in my head already. Now to get them out onto some paper.
