Spring Break
This is another of those no-I'm-not-dead-yet posts, for those who might be wondering…
No news to speak of on the No Going Back front. Every now and then the ranking numbers bobble at Amazon.com, so I think the odd copy is still selling from time to time. I've got maybe 10 or so potential reviews out there that might be written sometime, from places I know about.
This past week was spring break in local schools, including the university where my wife teaches. I wound up with a set of telephone interviews to do, but was able to take part of Thursday and Friday off for shopping and lunch at a Persian restaurant in Minneapolis. It was quite good. I'm justifying it as research for my new novel (the protagonist's best friend is from an Iranian-American family), though I don't quite have the chutzpah to claim the meal as a writing expense. We also did taxes this past week (mostly my spouse again), and I did a little more work on a parent involvement workshop about online safety that has been dragging on far too long.
I'm also plugging away on my new story. Partway through chapter 3 (the first 2 chapters are pretty short), and I'm now at the point where I need to figure out more clearly just which plot threads I'll be following in this story and where they might be going.
And I've dived into the political arena again, in connection with the radical new legislation to strip away collective bargaining rights from Wisconsin public workers on what seem to me like pretty spurious grounds. I won't get into the details here, but hope at some point to do some reading and writing connected to this. (Today I spent a couple of hours pounding the pavement to collect signature on a recall petition for a local legislator who voted for the bill. The claim from legislators and the governor: "This is what we were elected to do." My response: "I don't remember anything about taking away worker's rights. Besides, if this really is what the majority of Wisconsin voters want, then why should you be afraid of a recall election? Let's go ahead and turn it into a real referendum on this legislation." But I'm going down that nasty political road again…)
