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Happy New Year!

Have a great 2008, dear readers! We’ll be spending today recovering from Amy’s dad’s last holiday gift to us from our Louisiana visit last week: a headcold.

Meanwhile, here are my two photosets from that trip: New Orleans and Oak Alley Plantation. Oh, and Amy wrote pretty extensively (with more pictures!) about our trip here and here.

If I’m feeling up to it later, I’ll try to write something profound about my hopes for the coming year. Meanwhile, we’re gonna chill out and get back to our Lord of the Rings marathon on the big TV.

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Unrequired Reading: 2007 Year-End Edition

As promised — somewhat spur-of-the-moment-ly — here’s a collection of posts that I’ve been holding onto for a while. I wanted to write about each one in more depth, but the last few months have been so busy that I simply haven’t been able to give them the attention I think they deserve.

I think one of the reasons I didn’t write about some of these is that they would’ve led me into the familiar and boring territory of my failures as a book-publisher and as a writer. When I’m work-stressed and in need of a break, I don’t tend to think, “Maybe some public self-flagellation will make me feel better!”

In that spirit, here’s the last batch of Unrequired Reading for 2007! (If you want more, go plunder the Unrequired Reading archives!)

Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: 2007 Year-End Edition”

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Downtime

Sorry for the lack of new posts, dear readers! It’s sorta inconvenient to write here at my in-laws’ home. That means no year-end Unrequired Reading post till this weekend, and probably no pix from our today’s (overnight) New Orleans trip till then. But I bet they’ll both be worth it.

This week’s answers to “What on EARTH is Gil reading?” are The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin (re-read) and An American Dream by Norman Mailer. I’ll try to write about those this weekend, too.

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Words fail me…

. . . and apparently copy editing fails the holiday weekend staff at the Times Picayune, who ran 48-point headline on today’s sports section, reading, “Just Deserts“.

(Update: Dell Adams points out that this is the correct usage! Because I don’t trust anyone, I just looked it up and he’s right! I suck!)

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A new personal best/worst!

Thanks, federal government and state of New Jersey! I didn’t really want the other FORTY-FOUR PERCENT of my holiday bonus and online sales commission anyway!

Maybe in another year or two you can take more than half of my cash!

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Holiday Bounce

On the way out Friday, I set my outgoing voice-mail message to let callers know that I won’t be back in the office till January 2nd. Usually, I end that sorta message with, “If you need immediate assistance, please call my associate editor [whose name I don’t wanna give out] at extension 326,” but she’s going to be out till Jan. 2, too.

That’s when I decided that anybody who calls next week surely can’t be taken seriously.

So, till we get back, my associate editor and I have both set up our voice-mails to instruct the caller to contact the other one “for immediate assistance.”

That’ll learn ’em!