Happy Monday!

Sorry I’ve been MIA. I went on vacation for ten days. Of course I thought I would prepost before I left, but I was too busy writing and getting five people ready for a cross-country road trip. I ran out of time. I hope that you got lots of writing done while I was gone. Feel free to post your word count in the comments of this post. I wrote 0. I didn’t even take my laptop with me. I did talk to Julie about the story. We were out visiting her, and though we were mostly taking a whirlwind tour of DC, I did slip in a few conversations about the story. And guess what? I’ll be rewriting the beginning again. Fortunately, most of what I’ve written in the second half of the book can remain without a major rewrite.

And now, on with the review.

You must read A Short History of Everything by Bill Bryson. If you’re a writer, there are loads and loads of interesting anecdotes to inspire stories. If you’re not a writer, you should read it for the loads and loads of interesting anecdotes anyway

I didn’t actually read it, but listened to it. The first version I heard was an abridged version read by the author. I love his voice. The version we listened to on the trip is the full version. I really liked hearing all the new stuff, but it was read by somebody else. He had a good voice, but it wasn’t quite the same feel as the author.

For your Monday inspiration, I’ll leave you with a few quotations from the introduction. It’ll make you feel really good about your life, I swear

Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn’t easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.

To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once….

But the fact that you have atoms and that they assemble in such a willing manner is only part of what got you here. To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune. Survival on Earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of living things that have existed since the dawn of time, most-99.99 percent-are no longer around….

Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely-make that miraculously-fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result-eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly-in you.