Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

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  • Another weekend rabbit hole

    Picture of snow on rock formations in Arches National Park.
    Wandering Queen website recommends a visit to Arches in winter. Genius! In summer, its a madhouse of tourists.

    This travel blog — I stumbled on it while gawking around the vast universe of travel blogs — caught my attention for its depth of coverage.

    The Wandering Queen surprised me for its effort to provide detailed and useful information about places and gear. Since it covers areas I’m familiar with (including Oregon and western Canada) I appreciated touring suggestions, such as Best Oregon Coast Hikes. Since I’ve done some hiking on the coast, it was easy for me to assess the quality of the recommendations. They were good, and while the list missed a couple of my personal favorites (Humbug Mountain Loop Trail), visitors using it for their trip planning will get great views. It is the Oregon coast after all.

    There are packing checklists and gear recommendations and generally, it feels like a great website to find travel inspiration, which is how I spend the dark days of winter.

    My only (very small) bone to pick concerns lack of dates on the material. For example recommendations on hotels and restaurants in Jasper, British Columbia, don’t mention the devastating fire that destroyed a great deal of the town in summer 2024. But then again, current conditions on the ground are the responsibility of individual travelers to discover in their own trip planning.

    It’s a great little online spot to disappear into when the weather outside is frightful.

  • 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: