Tipping My Hat and Catching My Breath

About a year and a half ago, through a series of events that are not at all important, an editor at a national magazine asked to see this blog and liked what she saw. She liked it enough to offer to help me find an agent, and then she went further than that and actually sent a sheaf of my posts along to one particular, very well regarded agent, along with a personal note recommending me.

Nothing—other than a very nice, very quick rejection letter—ever came of it. The editor left the magazine shortly afterward, and I plodded through a summer that started with my last round of chemo, continued through my oophorectomy and the intense joint pain that followed, and led directly to my father's heart surgery and everything thereafter.

Since that time, I have not tried to find another agent.

I have not pitched that magazine or any other.

I have not, most pointedly, finished J-school.

But because that editor made one offhand comment about this blog—"reminds me a tad of Heather Armstrong’s dooce.com"—I checked Dooce out immediately and have been hooked ever since.

Dooce has a massive readership, and I'm sure Armstrong draws many people in because she is quirky, irreverent, and very, very funny. Her hyperbolic writing style is a guaranteed mood elevator for me, but what really gets me is the way she every once in a while comes at you from way the hell out in left field with a blisteringly honest post that hits you so hard and fast you can barely breathe.

This woman can write.

If you're going to read anything she's written, and you should, start with this.