Coffee stamps to MicB and Leslie (Elizabeth Gilbert and Ann Patchett)

I knew I was going to have the entire hoard of stamp used up and I bought the coffee stamps to have on hand. I had vowed that I would not let myself use them until the hoard was gone - but, that didn't work out. I had to get the envelopes in the mail so -- I went ahead and started on coffee. Those are some of my favorite colors.

I'm cringing at the way I wrote MicB -- it would take me a while to get a MicB that I liked. It's an odd group of letters. I feel better about the style on Leslie's - but it's not a *wow.* I am also thrown off by the spelling of MicB because I knew someone who went by McB -- so MicB looks like a misspelling to me. I'm sure if MicB sticks with the exchanges, I will figure out some MicBs that I like.

***

I do not have anything rant-worthy today, but I can recommend a book with some good ol' rants. I needed to find something to take to jury duty and checked it out from the library. Jury duty involves a lot of waiting and I had ample time to get into it. Lucky for me, they found enough jurors without needing me so I got to go home by noon. But, by then, I just wanted to finish the book and so I did.

Perfection by Julie Metz. I think it came out in 2006, so maybe everyone has already read it. The rant(s) she relates involve calling up 5 women with whom her husband had had affairs. She only found out about the affairs after he literally dropped dead, unexpectedly, in his mid40s and left some email tracks for her to follow. The book was recommended by Marion Roach Smith who teaches classes in writing memoirs and her recommendations seem to be good recommendations if you like those better-than-fiction stories.

While it was full of justified ranting, she does work through all kinds of issues and I will not spoil the ending. It was one of those coincidences that defies description - magical doesn't seem like the right word. Cosmic?

***

And I have to mention another book that has one of those unbelievable *things* that happens that seems very *cosmic.* I don't even know if that's the right word. The book is by Elizabeth Gilbert and the name is Big Magic - so maybe *magic* is the appropriate word. She had done a lot of writing on a book - but it wasn't coming together - so she set it aside. Then, years later she ran into another author (I'm pretty sure is was Ann Patchett) and when they were catching up and talking about what they were working on, Ann was working on a book that was pretty much everything that Elizabeth had already written and set aside. There's more to the story, but considering I'm not even sure I have Ann's name right -- I won't say more. I did enjoy the book a lot.

Oh, I love Google. I found a blurb about the incident. In Big Magic, Elizabeth tells how they even pin pointed how the idea that was *flying around* flew into Ann. (Yes, my memory was correct - it was Ann Patchett.)

The friends recently discovered they were writing novels about the same topic. As Patchett explained to Gilbert: “this friend of mine, who happens to be you...[was] writing a novel about the Amazon, and then you decided not to write a novel about the Amazon, and then I started writing a novel about the Amazon, and later when we compared notes (your book dismissed, mine halfway finished) they had remarkably similar story lines, to the point of being eerie. I thought this must be because it was an incredibly banal idea and we had both come up with a generic Amazon novel, but then you told me that ideas fly around looking for homes, and when the idea hadn’t worked out with you it came to me."