Archives - Weekly Update

As promised, we’re bringing you a very abbreviated newsletter this week as we all felt that three weeks between newsletters was toooo long! It’s also called “The Catch-Up Issue,” as it will give you time to catch up on some of our features that you may have been too busy to read over the holidays. And we have a LOT of them below, including our Year-End Contest where the Grand Prize has a value of over $1,000, the Holiday Author Blogs (which are terrific), our reviewers' “Best Of 2016” lists and more.

This year the Christmas holiday season crept up on me when I was not looking. In my usual tradition, this week I started knitting holiday presents. Each year I vow that I will begin clicking the needles for gift giving in August, but somehow the spirit of the season for me includes making the presents during the last two weeks of the year. Last weekend, instead of picking yarns and starting to knit, I decided to organize my yarn stash, which looks like a small yarn shop. I bought two-gallon baggies for organizing all the “works in progress,” of which there are many, and then started in on the three baskets of yarn that had various bits and pieces in them. I have half a basket more to go, and yarn lined up for six holiday presents. I work from home on Fridays, and there is something very calming to me about twirling my chair to look at these neatly organized shelves when I am on a conference call or stuck on a writing project.

It was a fun week as I turned 27...yet again! Amazing how that happens. The staff surprised me with a celebration with some of my favorite snacks and flowers, which you can see to the right. Rebecca “arm-knitted” me a scarf; she is going to teach me how to do it next week! It's amusing how well they know me. I joked at how very predictable I seem to be since they clearly hit it dead on for every angle for this party.

What a great Thanksgiving weekend we had. I cooked like mad on Wednesday, ate and entertained on Thursday, and from there I had three days with zero agenda and lots of leftovers (though somehow we still managed to cook two additional special dinners that weekend when my eyes crossed thinking about turkey).

There was lots of time for reading, as well as relaxing. First up was THIS IS HOW IT ALWAYS IS, a novel by Laurie Frankel, which will be published on January 24th. It’s a story about family, and how far a family will go to take care of each other, especially when they are hiding a secret. Claude is the youngest of five boys in the Walsh-Adams family. As a very young child, he makes it clear that he is happier wearing girls clothes and considers himself to be a girl. His parents, Rosie and Penn, know the path that Claude has chosen will be a difficult one, but they decide as a family to do what it takes to keep Claude’s wishes, even if it means keeping the true origins of their now-girl Poppy a family secret. And then one day, the secret is told; from there, their world that they carefully constructed implodes.