Mostly Good News

There's just a little bit more bad news. I'm going to get that out there real quick, like pulling off a band-aid. Then we're all going to think Happy Thoughts together.

The bad news is that my mother's father is now in the hospital, due to heart failure. He was admitted on Sunday, and I found out about it on Monday. The good news is that his life isn't in imminent danger, he's not in pain, and he's being well-looked after. I'm not sure if he'll get to go home again or if he'll need to move into a nursing home, because he's awfully weak at the moment, but either way, it's not horribly shocking. He is 90 years old, after all.

Now onto some the Good Things:

1) I got a raise! Not only that, it came with a glowing performance review. As my Scottish nanny used to say, I'm chuffed.

2) Ken cleaned and de-cluttered our condo and now it looks like something out of Better Homes & Gardens. I feel that I should get dressed up to go and sit in the living room. It's very restful to exist in such well-cared-for surroundings.

3) I spent the weekend resting my body and my soul. I took time to feel my way through all the thoughts that have been overwhelming my mind in recent weeks. I feel more centered and grounded.

4) I've been escaping into mass-market paperback novels, something I haven't done much of since high school. Once I became an English major I absorbed some of the literary snobbishness that comes with the territory. Any softcover book with shiny lettering on the cover was off-limits.

During university I signed up for a week-long internship with Harlequin, the romance publisher. In order to prepare, I had to actually read some Harlequin romances. I remember sitting in Robart's library, hiding a bodice ripper behind my enormous, hardback translation of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The shame associated with being found reading such "trash" would have been immense.

For the record, the most memorable parts of my internship were: a) reading unsolicited manuscripts sent in by all types of women, some of whom did not speak English as a first language. Judging by their manuscripts, it was a very distant second. Much as we chuckled over their terrible grammar, I felt bad that they had gone to the trouble of writing a whole novel and we were treating it as a joke. Writing a whole novel is pretty freaking impressive.

And b) The editor who was my mentor described to me how they determined how explicit to be when writing about sex in the various series they published. There was a line of very prim and proper romance; there was the middle-of-the-road stuff; and then there was a steamy, red-hot series. Apparently there was a major discussion in a meeting amongst the editors over whether or not they would allow use of the word "penis" in the red-hot line. That must have been some meeting. In the end they decided that "penis" was acceptable, and the first Harlequin novel containing that word was published shortly before my internship, in the early 1990's.

But I digress.

As it happens, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the published Harlequin novels I read for the assignment. I'm not so much into the romance genre for my own purposes, so I haven't read any more since then. However I have been enjoying a somewhat trashy thriller, and discovering the joys of Maeve Binchy.

I find a lot of "serious" novelists are morbidly depressed about life, and don't feel that their job is done until they've dragged the reader down with them. At this point, all I want is a good story with a happy ending.