Eventually, during a break between lectures, there was a little circle of conversation at the hotel coffee shop. I don’t recall how it happened, but something I said about my in-progress novel led to this editor’s turning to me and asking, “So, Courtney, what is your book about?”
Wordle is a fantastic, fun site that lets you make pretty word clouds. Yay! Me, I made a word cloud out of my most-used blog post tags. Let me show you it!
So, in case you haven’t seen it yet on Facebook or Twitter, I have the dubious honor of immersing myself in a jury pool this week. I grew up in Germany and attended German schools, so I’ve had little to nil exposure to the ins and outs of the American judicial system. Thus, I learned things today! Let me show you them! 3 Lessons from Jury Duty…
1. The court selects its jury pool from DMV records — not from voter registration or homeowner records, as I thought it did.
2. In a room full of 200 strangers, it’s rather inappropriate to voice your opinion that “all Middle-Easterners are inbred, and we should just let them all kill each other.” (The voicer of said opinion was a 60-something white man who, I gathered from his conversation, hasn’t spent a whole lot of time observing any Easterners, Middle or otherwise.)
3. If you don’t speak English, they still won’t send you home. (Instead, you get to sit there with the rest of us until someone figures out whether or not you’re really a U.S. citizen.)
In this video, I talk about:
Once upon a time, I got a job as a writer. I was eight months out of college, and I’d spent a season working retail at a place that sold educational materials for children. The stocking of shelves! A gripey assistant manager! A customer-cheating boss! SHRINK-WRAPPING!!! My mind felt like sludge at the bottom of …
Greetings, dear inklings! Today, you get the privilege of hearing a fresh, lively, lovely voice that’s not mine. ; ) Patricia Middleton has been my friend for the better part of two decades — which means I’ve benefited from her wit, her enthusiasm for life, and her creative inspiration for nearly 20 years. That’s pretty …
My dearest, most venerable inklings, Yesterday was Memorial Day. To celebrate this, the husband and I spent four days together with family members, installing hardwood flooring in the husband’s parents’ house. Here are a few moments that happened during that time: My brother-in-law practiced his baseball swing by hitting wood bees with a 2×4. For …
Since Ed and I moved here three-and-a-half years ago, we’ve had a tornado scare every spring. And without fail, every time there’s a tornado headed our way, it lifts somewhere west of us and passes us by. The same thing happened yesterday. We huddled in that basement for an hour, while the temperature rose, and the humidity increased…
You might not know this, my dear inklings — but I am involved in a grand scheme to change the world. I know. It’s hard to imagine that an artsy culture-geek such as I would be so idealistic as to want to alter even an iota of her environment. But, alas and alack, I’m too …
Today, my luvs, I shall list 10 blog post titles. These titles are for you. You may use them however you like. It would mega-cramazing if, when you use them, you’d link back to me so I can come read what you wrote in response to my titles.
If you don’t link back to me, I will send my legion of Evil Elves to tattoo “I’m a nerd” on your forehead.