Summertime
26 weeks to publication!
Hello friends!
I hope this finds you well and enjoying all of these longer days! It’s been a pretty rainy summer so far in Boston, but it’s been great for the garden, and we’ve still had plenty of time for outdoor fun.
There has been a lot happening on the publication front, and real progress is being made. There are only 26 short weeks to go until the pub date! Melissa Hayes at Globe Pequot handed over some heroic work with her copy edit. It was far more detailed than checking for typos and misplaced commas, and the two weeks that I had to work on it were barely enough time. I was cramming alongside my kids with final exams. There were so many judgement calls about quote clarifications and word choices that I wanted to be careful with and not rush through. I’m still not completely sure about alumna vs. alumni… But the contractual agreement of the two-week turnaround kept me moving through it, and now, it’s summertime for all of us.
I’ve talked a lot about how hard the Tigerbelles worked and how much adversity they overcame, but today I want to reflect for just a moment about how cool they were. I know the glamour isn’t how they got to the mountaintop, but they sure knew how to make all that effort look good. Sometimes I would find a quote that would remind me that no matter what these women had gone through in their lives, they still were a group of kids in their teens and early twenties. They were in their physical prime and no matter how lofty their goals, they made sure to have time off for fun.
Willye White argued against Coach Temple’s famous dancing ban saying that dancing “relieved tension” so they should be allowed, but Temple stayed firm answering that they didn’t win medals for dancing and those same legs that danced all night couldn’t be fresh in the morning. The Tigerbelles were famous in the Olympic Village, and the athletes from other countries begged them to teach the latest moves they picked up from watching American Bandstand.
There is nothing like some good live music to bring out your inner jitterbug, and if nothing live is happening, turn up the jukebox!
On the Bookshelf:
Fiction:
The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swan by the talented Virgina Pye hits all the buttons for me. It’s historical fiction set in Boston’s gilded age with a female writer fighting her commercial demands to follow her passion.
Trust by Hernan Diaz shared the Pulitzer with Demon Copperhead (one of my absolute favorites!) so it has to be something special. I’m always up for a gimlet eye on capitalism and power structures couched in glitz and glamour. Giving me Gatsby vibes.
Nonfiction:
Good For A Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World by Lauren Fleshman shows us just how far the sport has come since the Tigerbelle’s prime, and how much further we need to go.
Happy reading and happy dancing!
Aime