I Guess I'm a Pencil Nerd Now

It's always something with me.

This is a pack of 7 Japanese pencils I bought from Boston General, an online stationery shop with two bricks and mortar locations, in Brookline and Dedham, Massachusetts. I came across them doing an Internet search for Japanese pencils and bought myself their sampler pack as a birthday present since I like pencils.

I bought a pack of Mitsubishi-brand “office pencils” at the Kinokuniya bookstore flagship in New York City a while back and I’ve been enjoying using them so I thought it would be fun to check out other brands. This pack included a different Mitsubishi pencil and a couple of mechanical pencils among other things. I do most of my writing in pencil so I’m always going through them.

Speaking of Writing

One of my flash CNF pieces, “Gift,” was accepted by Scribes *micro* fiction and will be published in their March 15 issue. Yay!

I took a one-off flash webinar and another two-day session in flash writing and I want to mess around with some of my pieces that haven’t been picked up yet.

I’ve been reading Abigail Thomas’s Thinking About Memoir and it’s just the best book. So approachable and filled with great writing prompts. I’ll read a bit and then reach for my notebook and fill a page with another Five-Things exercise. Which can and often does become an essay. So fun.

I started reading my draft of my book and it was so depressing I put it aside for now. I know basically what needs to happen but I’m going to let it simmer a while and work on other things. Along with Five Things exercises I’ve added an observation journal to my writing practice after writer Heather Sellers recommended it in her craft talk on flash fiction. It’s like five minutes a day or less. It’s just a quick thing where I write a list of things I saw or heard the previous day, meant to hone my powers of observation. We’ll see how it goes. (Haha, see what I did? LOL I can’t stop. Somebody stop me.)

Otherwise I’m fiddling with essays and poems. I’m not sending much out right now because I have a lot in the hopper and I want to focus on just writing.

Books and Reading

I finished Ludmila Ulitskaya’s most recent release, a collection of short stories from Yale University Press called The Body of the Soul. Her stories are compassionate and often surprising meditations on womens’ lives, women and children; she can write a multigenerational novel in about 10 pages. This collection was translated from the Russian by the famous Pevear-Volokhonsky team. I enjoyed it a lot. She’s one of my favorite living writers. It’ll most likely show up on my year-end favorites list.

TV and Movies

I tried watching a Netflix doc about the Raelians but I got bored five minutes in and gave up. I can’t be bothered to look up the title. Which, like, trust me you don’t want to watch it anyway so whatever.

For Valentine’s Day my husband and I watched Crazy Rich Asians, which we saw in the theater when it came out in 2018. It holds up.

For my birthday, I opted for the Keira Knightly Pride and Prejudice. It was a little traumatizing seeing Tom Wambsgans putting the moves on my girl (IYKYK), but overall I enjoyed it. I think I saw it a long time ago. It’s like 20 years old. Jeff gave me the three Jane Austen Everymans Editions that I was lacking, including P&P, so it seemed like a good choice for my special day.

Trash Haiku

Coffee got spilled on
a bunch of my books so now
I need some new books.

Thanks for reading and have a great week!