QUICK ANNOUNCEMENT

     I'm taking a very brief break from my self-imposed cross-stitching isolation booth just to share this fabulous N.Y. Times review of A.S. King's latest novel, GLORY O'BRIEN'S HISTORY OF THE FUTURE:  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/books/review/glory-obriens-history-of-the-future-by-a-s-king.html?_r=0.  As anyone could easily learn by scrolling through my posts, I'm a huge A.S. King fan and I think kudos like this are long past due for her.  She is a true original, and I want to be like her when I grow up, except that I'm much older than she is and therefore, presumably, already more grown up, but I find that debatable.  Sadly, I haven't read GLORY yet, but I'm going to order it as soon as I finish this post, and maybe someday (post-baby-blanket-from-hell) actually have a chance to read it!  And if you're not cross-stitching a baby blanket, you have absolutely no excuse for not going out and buying this book for yourself right now, with extra copies for your favorite readers.  Because A.S. King just keeps getting better and better.

WHY I HAVEN'T BLOGGED IN 17 DAYS

     This may be some kind of new failure record for me - 17 days!  Holy shit!  But I do have reasons.  First I was absorbed in such a ferocious round of revisions to my book that I hardly did anything else except revise, go to work, revise, eat, revise, sleep, revise.  And since I finished that at the end of November, I've thrown myself into finishing a project that I barely started a year ago and left lying dormant until now.  Once of my nieces in Israel had a baby last January and I bought a baby blanket cross-stitch kit to make for her because I'm insane.  Well, now that baby is almost a year old, and I'm going to Israel on January 1st to visit my mother and to attend my other niece's wedding, and so I am absolutely determined to get this thing finished before I leave, no matter what.  So now, instead of obsessively revising, I'm obsessively cross-stitching, and I haven't even been able to think about anything else except, from time to time, about police in this country and their attitudes toward people of color.  But this isn't a subject I don't think about often anyway, because it pretty much arises on a daily basis for public defenders.  So mostly what I've been thinking about lately is: "Oh, so NOW do you people get it?"
     Anyway.  I know this is a short and lame-ass post, but I'm afraid that's the quality you're going to be getting from me until the end of the year because I'm going to be spending 95% of my non-work time cross-stitching maniacally and the other 5% trying to recover from it.  So if there's anyone out there in the blogosphere that misses my more thoughtful and informative and amusing posts, I apologize, and I'll try to make up for this shameful period once I get home in 2015.