Thinking of a title is too challenging today

Beret - vintage, thrifted
Scarf - vintage, thrifted
Dress - '60s vintage, a thrifted gift from Milla
Belt - vintage, thrifted
Bag - vintage, thrifted
Shoes - vintage, thrifted
Pin - vintage, a gift from Silvia

Milla sent me a gorgeous package of thrifted vintage goodies when I first moved to Austin. It was a wonderful welcome present! I have made good use of everything she sent, but this is the first time something has appeared here. I needed to look smart today because I'm judging a middle school creative writing contest, and went to pick up the entries this morning. "Look, I am a serious person! In Blue!" Or something. It's so lovely reading through all the entries - some are really very good, and all are sweet. And some involve polar bears and aliens. There should be more books about polar bears and aliens.

Wouldn't it be fun to be back in English class again, writing stories with a disproportionately large pencil in an exercise book? Throughout my childhood in Zimbabwe we used the same brand of exercise book every school year. It had a brown cardboard cover with a Zimbabwean animal printed in red, and the paper was sawdusty newsprint that tore if you pressed too hard with your pen. We used checked pages for maths and lined pages for everything else, and we had to Respect The Margins. I still resist writing in margins, because it has been so ingrained into me that Writing in Margins is Bad. I filled dozens of those books. And because my stepdad was a teacher, I got endless spare ones that I could take home and use for writing my 'novels.' I had an imaginary publishing house called Unicorn Publishing - made a stamp for it and everything - and I wrote out careful title and dedication pages for all my 'books.' I also wrote the year in Roman numerals at the front, because that made them seem more official.

I came across a couple of great articles on writing this morning that I thought you might find interesting. Laini talks about diving into your story rather than hovering around the edges, and Chibundu points out that writing a novel can feel an awful lot like constipation. I agree. And I also think that sometimes it can feel an awful lot like diarrhea. I was going to go on to say that we need some sort of metaphorical fibre to keep our writing life regular, but I think that may be stretching the analogy too far.