Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

Stuff gets done here

recent posts

  • The long farewell

    I missed two personal deadlines to get a somewhat polished version of my young adult thriller, “The Macklin Powers,” off to early readers. I promised to send it on a Friday. Friday passed with nothing sent. Then a week went by. Then I promised it would arrive on Monday, a day that also came and went. Then Tuesday and Wednesday. Those three days this week, I reread and cleaned up the manuscript. Except for a few social obligations, it’s pretty much all I did. Then Thursday afternoon, I emailed it to two dear readers. Then I slumped on the sofa for a while, took a bath, went out to dinner with friends.

    And felt a little like you do when the party is over. Relieved and sad.

    This book had a long birth. I started taking notes for it in 2007. I started writing snippets in 2010. Maybe actual chapters began appearing in 2013. I wrote hundreds of news stories during those years, so novel-writing always took a back seat.

    A couple of interesting points: As long as a book isn’t finished, its possibilities are all still open. Also, as long as I’m working on it, I don’t have to say goodbye to it.

    Along the way I found myself asking: Who is this book for? Am I writing it in such a way that its target audience will want to read it? It’s impossible to know before a book finds readers whether anyone will respond. I learned with this book what should be obvious. I am the first reader. I am writing a story to satisfy me. As I read through this manuscript this week, (making fixes to timeline errors, removing pesky adverbs, swapping in active verbs to replace passive ones), I discovered that I have satisfied the first reader.

    When I hear back from my next readers (both skilled storytellers themselves), I expect to make another round of adjustments. And then I will put on my marketing hat.

    Meanwhile, I’ve started dating this new sexy young story whose plot I don’t yet know but whose characters are becoming more real every day.

  • Holding space

    The story, told this week on This American Life, made me pull over and cry.

    For its beauty, for its simplicity. It tells the story of people who don’t want drug addicts to die. I would give more details, but I think others might appreciate experiencing this story the way I did.

    Here’s a link: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/809/the-call

    Perhaps only fellow journalists can burrow into the complexities of getting this particular story and then presenting it in such a moving way. My heart is so enriched and grateful for the people in this story who embody pragmatic love: They are available to value the person using, holding space open for that person so that she or he can survive another day. Maybe that other day will be the one in which a small miracle can happen, the miracle of the user seeing themselves in a new way.

    Canadian singer songwriter Bruce Cockburn wrote a song about this kind of love. This story brought that song to mind: “Orders.” Another thing to take a moment to appreciate:

  • Friendly neighborhood

    Literally and figuratively. Here in Eugene, OR, Friendly Street runs through a neighborhood of ordinary homes, a few fancied up, but many still modest. It’s known as the Friendly neighborhood and I love living here. It’s walkable, with parks and churches and schools and a small grocery and decent restaurants and no homeowners association policing home and yard appearance. People walk by and tell you how nice your yard looks, or ask about your kids, or notice your dog being well behaved. They set out extra produce from vegetable gardens or extra bulbs from flowering plants to share. (We do have our curmudgeons, but everyone is a curmudgeon sometime.) Among the gardens — perfect or tidy or messy or disastrous — there is a fine dose of whimsy. Here’s just one example from our morning walk. I love that I never know what I’m going to see.