I went bookstore visiting Monday since I was in Lexington for an appointment anyway. You know with gas prices you can’t just go somewhere without two or three good reasons, can you? Anyway my new book,
The Outsider, was already on the shelves in a couple of stores. That was good. What’s not so good is that I still don’t have any copies, so this big book giveaway I was advertising as “get your advance copy” turns out to be false advertising. Sorry about that, guys! I always got my books early before. Anyway I did the drawing today and decided to draw two winners to try to make up for being later having the book to send out than I expected. The winners are Donna from North Carolina and Jane from Missouri. I’ll get autographed books out to them as soon as possible. The person I spoke with at the publisher today said she’d get my books to me ASAP. They had been put in the computer as “back ordered.” I don’t even want to try to figure out what that could mean. At least they hadn’t really lost my address…I don’t think.
Thanks to all of you who entered my drawing. I’ll be thinking up something new to give away in September. Maybe somebody else’s book plus your choice of one of mine. So if you didn’t win this time, maybe next one.
Now to the usual mid-week entry. I came across this poem by Emily Dickinson. That’s a little different entry for me, but I found the information that Emily Dickinson who lived from 1830 to 1886 was such a private person that only seven of her 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime. But this poem about hope is surely one written by a poet for writers.
Hope Is the Thing with Feathers
by Emily Dickinson
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard:
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
Talk with you this weekend.
