As I mentioned in a recent post, my editor, Brenda Copeland, has given me back my manuscript, all marked up with red dots and lines and little symbols, and I’ve been working on revisions.

This is my third book and third editor.  It’s always a little scary having another person read your work and then make suggestions about changing parts of the plot or the structure of sentences.  I’ve been working on this book for a long time and parts of it are several years old.  I’ve reread and reworked certain paragraphs so many times that I now have them memorized.  So, when I first sat down with Brenda’s notes and started rewriting, I felt a little anxious.   When I read certain passages, after deleting a word or even a comma, the sentences sounded off.  No, I kept thinking.  There’s something wrong with the flow.  It was better before.

Have any of you been around here long enough to remember the Toast Ghost?  Because he/she’s back.  For the past two hours I have been smelling toast but…..there’s NOBODY HERE BUT ME.

Why toast, Ghost?  Why must you make your toast in our house?

I know I’ve blogged about this before, but I’m absolutely terrible at naming things.  Thus, I have a horse named Mark, and had another horse named Snoopy, a cat named Sneakers, a dog named Pongo, etc.  The reason I bring this up now is because for the past few weeks my wonderful editor Brenda Copeland and I have been trying to come up with a title for my new novel and we just kept coming up with one stinker after another. Well, I should say, I came up with the stinkers, and every time I had one flit through my little brain, I felt compelled to call or email Brenda to see what she thought.

I wish I could write stuff here about my kids, but they have this hang-up about something they like to call “privacy”, so I can’t tell you about how funny, charming and adorable they are.

But I can write about two hypothetical kids.

So imagine there’s a lady, let’s call her “Mom,” who knows these two young adults, we’ll call them Lisa and Drew.  Let’s imagine, for a moment, that she shares a home occasionally with these young people, and due to a genetic link that binds them, the lady feels somewhat protective of them.  Let’s also imagine that Lisa is approaching a birthday that not only marks 20 years on this earth, but also exactly five years of unrelenting sarcasm so that every conversation goes something like this:

I’m not a big follower of sports.

But my husband is.

On our first date, we met for a couple of beers at the Bull & Finch Pub in Boston, and Denis started carrying on about the Red Sox.  I had a thing for Denis, so instead of allowing my eyes to glaze over as I normally do when people start talking about baseball,  I madly rummaged around in my little crush-addled brain for something, anything that I might be able to add to the conversation.

“Do you know who Yaz is?” I asked.

We’ve had a two week hiatus from Hash Hags and tomorrow we are thrilled to be back with author Alice Hoffman.

You’ve all read her amazing new book The Dovekeepers, haven’t you?  What about The Red Garden, The Story Sisters, Here on Earth…well I can’t list them all, she’s written many, many books, not to mention the films Practical Magic and Independence Day, various children’s books, hmmm, let me see what else? Oh, she raises great sums of money each year for cancer and other charities for the arts and she’s a just a wonderful, fun fabulous friend and we hags are thrilled that she will be on the show.

They’re doing this thing over on Facebook where you’re supposed to look up the #1 song from the year you were born.  Then you are supposed to find a video clip of the artist performing the song and post it on your page.  I only have 20 things that I’m expected to do today, and only three people are enraged that I haven’t done something I promised them I’d do, so I have plenty of time for this kind of thing.

Denis and I spent New Year’s eve at the Eyesore and had such a wonderful evening that we decided we’ll spend every New Year’s eve here now.  What a beautiful and serene place to enjoy the last hours of 2011.  Above is the view from the kitchen. I was preparing a roast. Denis was outside, having one of his last cigs of 2011, and, I hope, his life. You can just see his foot.

Every few minutes, the colors all around us changed with the light, so I kept snapping photos. I won’t bore you with all of them. Just a few.