Website’s updated.

Is there a story behind the story?

Yup.

Does it involve a stalker?

Nope. (Although I did find a reader wandering near my home a few weeks ago. A harmless fellow. I think.)

Could it affect things here?

I hope not. I’ve done a careful inventory of the archives here and there, and I think I’ve been pretty consistent in not trading on my adult private life for material. But I'll probably be censoring myself more and more. And I might not blog about touring again. No great loss.

When all else fails, we can always talk about books. I've just finished SATURDAY'S CHILD (spectacular) and I've been re-reading A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN. As many times as I've read this book, which I feel is up there with TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, I didn't remember some of the nuances in the conversation between Katie and her mother just after Francie's birth. I remember, of course, how she told Katie to read Shakespeare and the Bible to her children, but I had forgotten their argument over Santa Claus. Katie says she doesn't want to teach her daughter lies; her mother insists that she must.

Mary Rommely says: "[T]he child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were."

Katie objects and says her daughter will know she has lied. But Mary thinks that's a good thing as well, as it will teach her disappointment at an early age. She also believes that it's good to suffer; I'd say it's inevitable and possibly essential, but I don't know if I can go along with "good." I guess ideas about child-rearing change a lot in a hundred years.