21 Days of Learning

To-be-weds, if you ever want to encourage many questions about when you plan to have children, all you have to do is go anywhere near a child at your wedding. Luckily my cousin Kim's fraternal 1-year-old twins, Cornell and Mariah. are so adorable that they were worth all the shouts of "You guys look like naturals" and "You should have some of your own." Being such cutie-pies, Cornell and Mariah have become accustomed to getting picked up by all manner of people. And though they were the hit of the wedding, I fear for their safety, because they don't seem to have that "crying when picked up by strangers" gene. And it'd be pretty easy to give into temptation and kidnap these two. Especially since, as you can see from this picture, Mariah is easily mesmerized by jewelery. I'm currently trying to convince my cousin Kim to move out here to L.A., b/c both Cornell and Mariah have had so many pictures taken of them, that they now instinctively go completely still and pose with adorable smiles on their faces whenever they see a camera. I'm not kidding. It's cute in practice, but creepy in theory. So I told Kim that since she's somehow trained her babies to be models at the tender age of 1, she should bring them out here, so that they can at least make a profit off of their deeply disturbing double talent -- and perhaps pay off their college bills ahead of time.

Hey guys, I'm on week 2 of a new 21 days of learning. So I've finally started hitting Yoga classes like everybody else in Los Angeles. Also, I've been scaring myself silly with books like "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers" and "The Sell Your Novel ToolKit."

I know that most of good writing is rewriting, and that it's actually better to take a break from a piece before tackling the rewrite, and that my habit of writing a rough draft and then abandoning it, needs to like stop.

And I'm actually quite excited to start the upcoming 21 days of rewrite with all this new knowledge. But I am also incredibly scared that I won't be able to fix the things that are wrong with my novel, much less get it published. And my abject fear of doing this rewrite is really messing my head and actually keeping me awake at night. It feels like my writing demons are building up an impossible-to-beat army while I take this breather.

But in the end, I suppose that being dead terrified of a thing is never a reason not to do it.

In other news, I'm also taking African Dance, for the first time in 10 years. Those who heard the story I told at Spark's "Water" Storytelling Event last April, will realize the significance of that.

I'm taking the class on Wednesdays at the Heartbeat House in Silverlake. It's fun, and taught by Doris, a West Indian dancer with a ridiculously thick French accent and the even more cartoonish habit of saying, "What! Es eeeee-zeeee!" when we students mess up a complicated move on our first try. Anyway it's fun. I'm also taking a Bollywood Dance class at Heartbeat on Saturdays, which is also fun.

And if you're now all awash in curiosity from my above mention of Spark's Storytelling Event, you'll have the chance to see me perform for only the second time in almost ten years, because Spark has asked me to retell my story for a big event that they're throwing on Sept. 20 at The Santa Monica Library. More details coming at the end of August, but save the date.

Talk to you soon,
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