A Blogger Kind of a Day

You know those spells when you do dumb things and everything goes wrong? I think I'm in one. Yesterday I got in my car to go to the dentist and, dreading the appointment, thought I'd cheer myself by putting the top down and enjoying the cool morning air. Only the top didn't go all the way down--or it did, but the car's security system didn't know that. And it wouldn't go back up. So every time I started up after a stoplight or some other stop, the silly thing beeped loud and long at me. I tried pulling over, cutting the engine, and starting again--that worked once before--but nothing. Fortunately, when I got to the dentist's office, it decided to cooperate. I got the top up and left it. So tomorrow, I'm off to the VW dealer.
Then today in the grocery store I asked the check-out girl to make me some new keys, then promptly stood at her cash register and panicked because I didn't know where my keys were. Could I have possibly left them in the ignition? I turned to tell her I had to go to my car--and of course, there were my keys. We both had a laugh, but it was a bit rueful on my part.
But today was a blogger's day. One of our authors worries that his book is not getting enough publicity--there aren't the review outlets that he was used to ten, even five years ago, nor do the biggies like the New York Times or Publishers Weekly notice midlist books from small academic presses (they used to but this is a brave new world). So I wrote and suggested he consider a blog, even a blog tour--whereby an author offers himself to many other bloggers as a guest either for a posting or an interview. It's a big thing with mystery writers, and I thought it should work for a literary author if he put his mind to it. But he wrote with many objections, one of which was that he thought blogs were just personal confessionals gone public and nobody read them but the person who wrote them. He did say it apologetically, because he knows I have a blog. I didn't convince him, and he asked to be excused, which is ok.
But then I got an email from my oldest son's high-school girlfriend--now that's been 20 years or more. She'd stumbled across my blog, said she was interested to learn where all the kids were and what they were doing and about the grandchildren, but she was really interested in what I had to say about writing as process and as an integral part of my life. After a 15-year marketing career, she's trying some creative writing though I don't know what kind. She went on to recall dinner discussions at my table which were, she said, so interesting she often didn't want to leave the table.
Well, talk about make my day. This was a girl I was always fond of, and for her to share such memories and to think I might inspire her somehow was heartwarming to say the least.
I couldn't resist. After I replied to her, I wrote and told the blogger skeptic about it, and he agreed it was a "gratifying" response. Yeah, it was.