Ups and Downs

First, I got a nice ego stroke when I got a comment that The Daily Reviewer selected this blog as one of the top 100 romance blogs. Sure, I gotta take it with a grain of salt. I mean, how likely is it that they really got nominations about me? They feed my content to their ad-supported site. But on the other hand, their links to my blog also feed my Google rankings, so that's a benefit to me. And I have a nice pretty badge to paste here.

Then, I got word that a book I edited is now available at Amazon. And Amazon lists me as editor! That was pretty cool. Most of the stuff I work on, I don't get public credit for, which is fine. But it's nice when I do, and I am happy to say I'm proud of our work on this book. It's got a pretty decent approach to dieting, too, IMO.

But then...

Then I got an e-mail that Kate Duffy had died. I never had the pleasure of meeting her personally. I have been rejected by her, dating all the way back to my second book. She was one of the powerhouses of romance publishing, someone known to be blunt and challenging, who really knew her stuff. If she liked your work, you could bask in the glow of that for a week. We will suffer for this loss.

Hitting a little less close to home, a little more in an "end of an era" kind of way, was news of William Safire's death. It's been a long time since I heard anything about him, or read anything by him, but when I was in high school and college and first starting out in my career, he was The Word on everything to do with words. If he said put the period inside the quotation marks always (and he did say that), by gum, I put the period inside the quotation marks. Always. So even though he has no current impact on my life...he'll be missed.