I'm baaaaack. And I'm baaaaaacked up, work-wise, that is.
The trip was a complete success. From the blazing hot beach days
to the fabulous meals to the big laughs with the family to the
OMG I love my Dad and my siblings to the happy birthday Mad
celebrations.
One of my favourite moments was when four of the siblings, including me,
were cavorting in the water and Roger, second youngest and perhaps the most scarred, physically and mentally, from our tortuous childhood, paddled out to join us in a rubber raft. We were going to dump him out until he protested, citing his hydrophobia, and we actually desisted (!) Instead, we 'pushed him out to sea' (in reality, a crystal clear Canadian lake) chanting, "VIKING FUNERAL,VIKING FUNERAL!"
The whole thing was shot by his girlfriend, and my Dad can be heard commenting, "I've never seen the five of them play together before."
Sadly, on my birthday, we couldn't see the meteor showers as the sky was overcast.
(Although the honest truth is that everyone was dog tired by meteor shower night and although nobody was wimpy enough to actually say it, I think
we all felt a bit relieved by the uncooperative cloud cover because we could toddle off to bed instead of sitting up all night in awe and then making the drive to and flight out of Winnipeg in a state of exhaustion.)
I had a few hours to kill in the 'Peg the next day so I dropped in on an old
highschool pal, Jordan Van Sewell, who is an amazing artiste.
It's hard to find pictures of his work I can pirate and paste on my site, but the book shown at the top of this post, The Jester's Realm contains a ton of gorgeous images.
We picked up our conversation where we'd left off nine years ago, as old friend are apt to do. Many laughs ensued. When the time came, he drove me to the airport in a typical Winnipeg torrential downpour.
I'm heavily into the Millenium trilogy by Stieg Larsson. I'd read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo before my trip, and kept book number two, The Girl Who Played with Fire, for the trip. I cracked it open on the flight out, read five hundred or so pages during the week, and on the flight home I read until the plane taxied to a stop in Toronto.
I'm now reading the third and final book of the trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's nest.
If you haven't started reading the trilogy yet, you're in for a real treat. Start at the beginning, please, with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
The late, alas, Stieg Larsson was a true feminist. He delivered the manuscripts for all three novels at once (freaky deaky, Tom Wolfe would say to that) and died shortly thereafter. All three books have been made into movies in Sweden and, now that the trilogy is a worldwide sensation, are about to be remade, Hollywood style. ('Cause you know the Americans have such trouble with sub-titles.)
Since I've been back I've tried to get to work only to have belated birthday celebrations getting 'in the way' day after day. But I think we're done now!
So, back to work tutoring and creating a new program for the writing school, and finishing an Amazon review of editor Sacchi Green's latest antho, the very purty, very dirty Lesbian Lust.
Oh, and any day now Michael Crawley and Laurie Clayton's exciting crime novel, The Women's Club will be flying off the printing press and into the hands of happy readers everywhere! If you can't wait (and I don't blame you) you can pre-order now!
UK
Canada
USA .
Yahoo!
Must fly!
xoxo Mad
