Happy Friday!

Today is my second to last day at the company I’ve worked at for the past eight years. It’s surreal. But an odd thing has happened in the past two weeks’ since I’ve given my notice: I’ve gotten less nervous about my impending new job, and more just plain excited.

Which helps immensely, since I’m the kind of person who’s terrible at making decisions and is constantly second-guessing herself. If you prescribe to astrology, you could say it’s the Libra in me. If you don’t, you could say it’s just how I am.

Anyway, here are some things I hope you find interesting:

1. The unintentional last words of 13 writers

2. Something that has always bugged the hell out of me

3. I love this advice, especially this line:

Love isn’t enough. Marry the person who brings out your best and will stand beside you at your worst.

4. Some advice on navigating this newish social platform–immensely helpful to those of us who work on social for a living/are writing for teenagers for a living.

Reading: This (after DNFing this). It’s really different. I’m not sure I like it. The prose is beautiful though, so I’ll probably finish it.

Writing: The YA fantasy. At the same time, in a fit of excitement, I submitted my YA contemporary to an agent via a #PitMatch on Twitter–my first time submitting this manuscript to an agent–and received this very nice rejection email:

We felt the writing was quite lovely and from the synopsis the plot looks intriguing. However, our guidelines require that our books not include drug/alcohol use or progressing beyond kissing, among other things. We do encourage you to keep submitting to other publishers because we feel the manuscript has promise for another house.

Yeah. My book includes drinking, smoking, and “progressing beyond kissing” (most of it in the first few chapters). I feel kinda dumb for submitting to them (though I don’t see anything about these guidelines on their site), and at the same time, it’s one of the nicest rejections I’ve ever gotten. It gives me hope that this manuscript will be more well-received than my first.

Watching: I stopped watching this after the first few episodes, because I did not like it. I find the writing and acting to be sub-par. However, I was encouraged via Twitter to give it another shot. I still don’t think it’s all that great, but it does hold my attention and it’s something to have on while cooking, so there’s that. And I like Bellamy. (Though not really anyone else.)

Listening to: Maybe I should take this category away because I tend to listen to the same stuff over and over. Though I am starting work at a music-related company next week so that may change.

Cooking: I made this soup this week and it was simple and delicious.

Have a lovely weekend 🙂

Photo by Guillaume Baudusseau on Unsplash