I’m so excited: I’m reading the manuscript of a friend’s just-finished mystery novel.
I love reading more than pretty much any other activity (besides, maybe, eating), and reading a friend’s work — especially when it’s great — is so much fun. The dialogue! The suspense! The inside jokes! I’m very proud of him for having the focus and discipline to create this whole world.
It has me thinking a lot about creativity. We’ve all got it, but creative endeavors inevitably get pushed off: we think, I’ll nurture that part of myself, but I have to make it through this day first. So it’s inspiring when people in your life say darn those torpedoes, I’m going to do this!
It’s going to be a sunny, fabulous few days out there, folks. Get inspired.
Links this week:
- Portrait of the author as a young man: from the Guardian, a rarely-shown painting of Roald Dahl is on display in London. The painting by Matthew Smith is from after Dahl’s career as a Royal Air Force pilot (and the crash that ended that career) and before he was inspired to start writing.
- In this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Lois Lowry talks about the long process of seeing her classic The Giver adapted to film. (And lest you know Lowry only through The Giver and its sequels, you really oughta check out her comic Anastasia Krupnik series, the tragic A Summer to Die, and her first Newbery-winner, Number the Stars.)
- A nice profile on CLiF on new good-news aggregator NationSwell.
- And if you missed Meredith’s excellent post about teaching kindness, here’s the Washington Post article she linked that sums up a recent Harvard study about helping children learn to be kind.
Happy Friday!
