I’m actually

• Watching the garage door across the street go up and down
• Trying to figure out if the sculpture across the street was made by Nambé
• Repeatedly watching a short video of my 3 month-old granddaughter gurgling and shrieking.
• Trying to decide if I want a mocha or a regular latte

So I was looking over some ancient queries and noticed that in tiny letters one of the rejections had the words “canned response” in the email address. You have to admire that sort of truth in advertising. Side note: when my husband was a kid, he was one of the “Mmm, Mmm good singers in the Campbells soup commercial.

I just used Shazam on my iPhone to download music from the Cloud onto my MacBook. Yes, I know any 6 year-old can do that. But would they download this?

Two things I hate in a novel: Plots that turn on highly intelligent perceptive women doing obviously dangerous and/or stupid things. The other is a Deus ex Machina ending. And I hate them even more when they show up in a mystery. And I hate them MUCH, MUCH MORE when it’s a really well-written mystery. And this just happened to me.* And I was so excited about figuring it out. Then about 25 pages before the end, the antagonist went into a two-page monologue filling in most of the blanks and the MC went back into the house with him even though she knew he was going to try to kill her. End of rant.

*I won’t mention the author’s name but it rhymes with Flanya Mensch.

Copy this and paste it where you can see it when you write.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58530/berryman

Do I sound like a Jewish mother, or what? Of course, I do. I’m a Jewish mother.