Friday Five

1. Starting off on a downer. A boy from my undergrad Erik Downes has been missing for three days. He was on a study abroad trip to Costa Rica with two professors and several other students. Four of them got caught in a riptide. Erik hasn't made it back to shore. Please include him, his family and my uni in your thoughts and prayers. The Oglethorpe community is such a small one. I don't know Erik well, but I know other students on the trip, and the professors involved. He's on student government and in the fraternity I knew best, so our paths did cross. It's so jarring to realize these things happen to people whose face you once saw almost daily.

2. Doing line-edits on current manuscript to make it presentable for class and SCBWI means paying close attention to words and description. I spend hours on paragraphs and decide it all sucks. So that's fun.

Except it is. I love it when WIPs eat my brain.

3. Speaking of which, I have a new one in mind. I don't know when I'll start it. I need to learn to shift gears and let WIP 1 go. The plot and structure seem pretty solid now, so maybe soon I'll be able to.

4. I commented on Gayle Foreman's blog yesterday about my desire for a new band in 2011. Someone willing to sing about how desperate our current situation is. She agreed, we need a new Nirvana. Last night at dinner "Smells Like Teen Spirit" came on between "Life after Love" and "Truly Madly Deeply". If we've started forgetting the meaning behind the words like that, we do need a new force and in a hurry. Nirvana is not, and will never be, a soft-rock radio overplayed song. At least not if we remember the reasons they were so popular.

5. I tried this last year. By tried I mean we bought it for $13 and it sat in my fridge for nearly six months before it disappeared at a party. It is as disgusting as it looks.