Tags

, , , , ,

 

Would that I had "The Persistence of a (GOOD) Memory!"

I got an e-mail yesterday afternoon from the Novel Publicity Tour Director, Emlyn Chand. We have become internet friends over the last few months, and I have come to really appreciate her support and guidance in the writing field.

Back in February, Emlyn asked me to host the Novel Publicity Blog Tour for Dr. Kerwin Swint’s newest book, “The King Whisperers.”  She has since asked me to participate – by reading and reviewing, as I did for Dr. Swint’s book in yesterday’s post (linked above), in two other tours.  One for a book by Terri Giuliani Long, called “In Leah’s Wake,” and another called “Bridges,” by dk LeVick.  Another person asked me to review at my earliest convenience a book by Kaira Rouda called “Here, Home, Hope.”

Gentle Readers, I am an eternal optimist, but I am frequently, apparently, delusional.  I wrote the dates down, but of course misplaced them.  I had no worries though, because I kept all the e-mails in which the schedules were listed.  The first date I recalled was for Dr. Swint’s book.  I had until May 29th.  I was certain and confident.  I had begun drafting the review, and had scrapped different ways that I wanted to approach it.  Nevertheless, having read the book through twice, I knew when the time came I would be ready to post the review, and because I really liked the book, I wanted it to be a good one.

Emlyn’s e-mail to me yesterday asked if I was ready to post my review of “The King Whisperers” that day (May 13).  Certain that was not the date I had signed up for, I immediately started a reply stating that perhaps she had made a mistake.  I knew the date was supposed to be MAY 29th!! Before pressing the “send” button, I decided to go back through my e-mails and check all my dates with Emlyn’s ventures. I will acknowledge that at times I can behave in a rather addlepated manner, so acting on the side of caution I thought that was a good idea.  It was.  I had indeed signed up for the final date of the tour, which was Friday, May 13th.

Understand, I got this reminder e-mail yesterday – which I really appreciated – and owing to Emlyn’s excellent record of keeping in touch, I knew it was not a requirement for her to have sent a query to me, but I’m so glad she did.  Before going on some extensive errands yesterday, I decided to do a quick check of my e-mails, which I had not yet done that day.  There was the one from Emlyn.  If any of you had been here, you would have seen the blood slowly draining from my face, and watched me slump in my desk chair in absolute horror!  What on earth would I do?  I had promised!  But I had those errands that had to be done, and I knew I would not be back until late afternoon.  I quickly dashed off a note to Emlyn and told her that I would do my utmost to get the review up that day, but it would be quite late.  I didn’t get home until after 6 p.m.

On arriving home, I grabbed a quick microwave meal (I nuked it first!), and a glass of iced tea and went directly upstairs, food and drink in hand, fired up Sonya, and commenced writing the book review that has to go down in history – at least for me – as the fastest one ever written.  I did have the advantage of having thoroughly read the book through twice, so it wasn’t like it was a total cold start, but I was at a loss, when pressed for time, as to how to frame the review, which I knew would be favorable.  I wanted to give Dr. Swint his due.

Without any of my notes, relying on my memory and a few annotations on the book’s pages, I finished the review at 10:27 p.m.  I scheduled it to post at 11 p.m. so in case Emlyn was awake, she could check it to make certain there were no glaring errors and it was acceptable, such as it was, before the post went “live.”

BTW, I do, actually, have a review scheduled for May 29th – it is for “In Leah’s Wake,” and it is now written in CAPS on the dry erase board by my desk, along with the “Bridges” review on June 11th, and the “Here, Home, Hope” review which I scheduled myself for June 15th. Here’s hoping.  The way things are going now, I would like to suggest to any of you out there in the blogosphere who are reading this that perhaps you could jot me a little comment on one of my posts near any of  the review due dates, to give me a little nudge.  The dry erase board is located to the right of my desk.  I have no peripheral vision, so if I don’t purposely turn my head right, I don’t see it every time I sit down at the desk. Your comment to me might be something like, “Hey! Paula!  Turn your head to the right!”  I’ll know what you mean. . .

I will tell you that I have finished reading all the books except one – (only a few pages left to read) – and it is the last on my tour schedule, so at least I will be able to write my reviews with a little knowledge of the material.  I have been reading in addition to those “required” books about 6 more I’ve downloaded on Kindle.  I wonder if I will be making references to “Fierce Pajamas” while writing about “Bridges?” We shall see.

So, you are wondering about this post title.  While furiously writing, deleting, inserting, writing, deleting, deleting, writing, and posting, then correcting, updating, and reposting, a particular song kept running through my head.  It is one of the opening choral songs from Stephen Sondheim’s brilliant musical “A Little Night Music,” based upon Ingmar Bergman’s film “Smiles of a Summer Night.”  The song references the endless twilight that occurs each midsummer’s night in countries in the far north of the northern hemisphere.  The final line of that song is one of my tip-top favorite lyrical lines, and indicative of Sondheim’s brilliant lyric-writing ability, in addition to his music. (The entire score of this musical is written completely in variations of 3/4 – waltz – time.  If you’ve never seen the musical, (don’t bother with the highly inferior film of the musical,) then just get the Original Broadway Cast recording.  You will be amazed and delighted!) 

This is the line that ran through my head while writing yesterday’s review:  “The hands on the clock turn, but don’t sing a nocturne just yet!”  All the while I was writing, the hands on the clock kept turning, but the sun did set last night, alas!  What a nightmare! Here’s the song – hope you enjoy it!

I still had about 3 more hours of writing to do before I could go to bed. . .

I think I’ll write a review or two this weekend – maybe get some out of the way before they are due, so the nightmare is never repeated!

For right now, though, I’ve definitely done enough. . .

Advertisements
https://paulatohlinecalhoun1951.wordpress.com/2011/05/14/a-little-nightmare-music/
paulatohlinecalhoun1951.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-22
159956
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:GS5PWBIVMYOFNNGVDPJEJV2G2VMTSMO5
<urn:uuid:58c8563c-18fb-495c-a6ec-d4beb9663c9c>
2018-05-27T05:03:35Z
192.0.78.12
text/html
sha1:JANXQJ3DDNZHC3IAWOWRBY67Z4P23VTI
<urn:uuid:d2d2071c-1e41-472d-8b79-9e7548a17bb0>
https://paulatohlinecalhoun1951.wordpress.com/2011/05/14/a-little-nightmare-music/
length
response
<urn:uuid:3a8d0ef5-d09e-48c3-aed2-9268788f3d3c>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-136-201-20.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-22
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf