I’ve been reading in the early morning hours, while Dan plays with Liliana around the pool.  It’s been utterly delicious.

I just finished reading Broken for You.  Excellent book.  Started out slow, but built up steam and was a tear-jerker in the end.  A great book about an odd, yet believable, surrogate family.

I’m onto one I’ve been wanting to read for a while–a writing book on style, that elusive thing everyone talks about, but no one knows quite what it is.  It’s called The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing.  I’ll let you know how it is.  Already in the preface, I would agree with a quote from Natalie Goldberg’s book Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life: “Style in writing…means becoming more and more present, settling deeper inside the layers of ourselves and then speaking, knowing what we write echoes all of us; all of who we are is backing our writing…We are each a concert reverberating with our whole lives and reflecting and amplifying the world around us.”  I’ve always been cognizant of doing this, what I call “writing along the bone” of something–writing so close to truth, that it can’t help but resonate with many people.  I believe that we humankind are built of the same emotions and feelings, and even if we don’t share the same lifestyles and experiences, we recognize them when we read them or hear about them.  And that’s what makes a book shine.  Do you feel the same?

Some books do it; others don’t.  As a writer, you hope yours does, but no one can be the true judge of it, except the individual reader.

We tried the beach again today with little L, and she did marvelously well.  She sat on the wave line with me, and repeated over and over again, “Come here, come here…go away, go away!”  She thinks she has magical powers, calling the waves to and fro.  Very funny.  This time, she loved washing her hands in the water after digging in the sand.  We left early (to end on a positive note) and ate at a delightful place just down the road from the beach.  Liliana saw her first giant iguana next to our table and couldn’t stop talking about it.  “Iwana, iwana,” she said, as it frisked away.

[Post image: Enjoying a cheeseburger and fries in town]