Mardi Gras, Watered Silk

Advance notice: Saturday, Feb. 25, 2 pm, I will be at the Rum River Public Library in Anoka, MN, to give a talk and sell books.

Another: Saturday, March 24, from one to five: Bloomington Book Fair, at the Bloomington Center for the Arts, 1800 Old Shakopee Road, Bloomington, MN. I’ll be sitting at a table with Carl Brookins, senior member of my writer’s group, and we’ll both have books for sale.

Today is Mardi Gras, AKA Shrove Tuesday, AKA Fat Tuesday. Lent Eve. In medieval times Lent was serious business. People gave up meat (and meat products like fat) altogether between Ash Wednesday and Easter, and did other penitential things, so today was the last day to have a blow out, and use up things you couldn't have for forty days. Lent is a season of reflection and regret but with a glorious promise at the end. Kind of sad, but typical, that we as a culture have kept the party but forgotten the reason for it. Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday. Look for people with black smudges on their foreheads. I only found out recently that the ashes are made from last year’s palm branches. “Remember, Man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return,” a reminder of one's mortality. Serious business. End of sermon.

I’m starting to look at my next book, Watered Silk. Three mornings a week – early mornings, 6:30 am – I go to a place called Courage Center for water aerobics. They specialize in rehabilitating people with physical problems, whether from genetic problems, accident or illness. I have psoriatic arthritis and their heated Olympic-size pool is a Godsend. Standing shoulder-deep in the water I can do vigorous movements impossible on dry land. But I also write murder mysteries, and for some while I have nurtured an image of an instructor coming in very early in the morning, when all is still dark, turning on the high overhead lights, and finding a young woman's body floating in the deep end. Cool, right? Well, Courage Center doesn’t think so. They think a book about a murder set in a place where vulnerable people gather is a very bad idea. But the heroine of my series is well established as going to the Courage Center. So I’m going to invent a place not unlike the Courage Center and say the Courage Center has to close its pool for a couple of weeks to drain it and make repairs, and so the Early Birders have to find a temporary new location for aerobics. And it’s that fictional place that will startle an instructor turning on the lights. I have a friend who lives in Canada, who has a friend who likes to design buildings, and this friend of a friend and I are going to come up with a building that has a door with a broken lock . . .

I love my job.

Short Subjects

Yesterday I found out that I will need eye surgery on both my eyes. Fortunately, it is a fairly common surgery, with a fairly safe bet of sailing though it with no problems at all. I found out a couple of years ago that I have glaucoma in both eyes, but the eye drops I’ve been using are not bringing the pressure down enough to stop it from damaging my optic nerve. So they propose to cut tiny "trapdoors" in each eye to release liquid and ease the pressure. The surgery will take place on March 19 and April 2 and I will wear an eye patch for a few days after each procedure. Suitably ornamented with sequins, I assure you.

Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, a season of repentance, reflection and renewal. I wonder how many people caught up in the wildness of Mardi Gras understand it used to be a last hurrah before the stern period of Lent? I consider myself a Christian, but I’m not going to throw myself into all the stern ways of marking Lent – heck not even half of them. But then I didn’t get to go to Mardi Gras, either. :)

I want to take a long train trip early in the summer of 2010, from Minneapolis to Seattle, then down along the coast, then east to Salt Lake City, where I’ll be the speaker at a an Embroiderers’ Guild of America Convention. If anyone out there knows how to go about organizing such a trip – I’d like to stop along the way and do book signings and also take a couple of days to explore Yellowstone – please contact me. Thank you.