June: I spent a week in Paris, holed up in a lovely, weird apartment that looked more like the inside of a small yacht than a rental unit. But it was in Paris! And it had a loft for writing with a desk and skylight and everything! I had wine! I had cheese! I had my laptop and my manuscript and mon amour! It was pretty perfect, in spite of the persistent rain! (The whole trip was a series of exclamation points. Particularly because it was an adults-only vacation.)
Pictures? Well, yes. But my computer is being a jerk right now and won't import the pictures right-side-up. Still, here are a few, and if you tilt your head to the right, you can sort of see what they are and read the corresponding exclamations:
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| We made Frenchmen faces with our food! |
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| We filched strawberries from our potted patio garden! We had a red door! |
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| We drank from cats! |
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| Writing Loft! Looks weird, right? Even right-side up. |
Then, to console my poor child whom I left behind to spend a week in France, I carried said child off to Galveston, where we boarded a ship and cruised to Mexico for 5 days. The boy spent his time in the wave pool, and I spent time doing my two favorite things with my mother:
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(You may have, at this point, made the assumption that I am wealthy--traipsing all over God's green earth. Let me just remind you that I'm a university instructor teaching an extra course this summer and leave it at that.)
The whole of June, I was daily astounded by my website hit counter. When you're a novelist with one book, published by a small press that has already sunk into oblivion, you're used to getting a few visits per day. After my miniopera was selected as a finalist in the ENO competition, my hit counter went so high, I surpassed my "free" storage limit. June: 1,089 Page Loads. 785 Unique Visits. Gah!
I began wondering...what if these people who loved the poetic writing in my miniopera also read my novel--even the Kindle free version in the Kindle Lending Library...maybe my little orphaned novel would have another chance--and international debut! Brits would love my novel about peculiar American Southern girls.
In short, the rest of my June was spent dreaming of wild success and doing absolutely zip to promote it.
Now, it's July. I've begun teaching a summer semester at SMU, and I'm reminded yet again how much I love teaching college students. They teach me a lot, too.
Happy July, folks. What did you do (or are planning to do) this summer?
