Wendy McClure

Author and Professional Obsessive.

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Archives for February 2006

Lately linking

February 28, 2006 by Wendy

My brother has a blog now! Check it out.

Filed Under: General

Guestbook

February 27, 2006 by Wendy

Yes, I know: when you scroll down to leave your comment you see a note instructing you to “leave your comment in the guestbook instead.” Ignore that. You’re already here at the guestbook. If you click on “guestbook” you’ll find yourself back here on this page, reading these same words again, and that will be weird. So you’d better just sign the guestbook.

Filed Under: General

Long live all that Venus/Mars stuff

February 22, 2006 by Wendy

I’ve mentioned Chris a couple of times here recently, and in the comments for my last entry someone speculated that before long I’d have “something sparkly on my left hand.”

Chris told me the first thing he thought when he read the comment. “A sparkly glove?” he wondered. “Like Michael Jackson?”

This is why we’re together, you know.

Filed Under: personal, popcult

How I've been

February 17, 2006 by Wendy

It feels like all my habits are different now. Some of this is deliberate. I stopped drinking Diet Coke last month. I expected this to be drastic, like getting my forehead tattooed, and somehow it is not. I did it for lots of reasons, though I think one of the most significant ones is that, well, Diet Coke is heavy. I’m tired of carrying those twelve-packs and cases, which, with those little cardboard handles, feels an awful lot like tying a set of encyclopedias to your fingers and letting them dangle.

And I was sick of the cans, especially all the empty ones in my car. When I drove on bumpy roads my car would sound like a junkie pushing his shopping cart. And just after I started cutting down on Diet Coke I found these videos, which helped my resolve considerably. If Diet Coke does that to Mentos, I wondered, what is it doing to my minty fresh soul?

And then when I stopped drinking so much Diet Coke. I started drinking black coffee. I mean I just stopped putting sweetener in the one cup I have at work in the morning. I haven’t felt this adult since the moment I realized I really actually sort of enjoy hearing Nina Totenberg read aloud Supreme Court transcripts on NPR. (No shit, I like it better than the recorded courtroom audio they’ve had recently. That Nina, she does Scalia’s quotes so snippily!) Anyway, it’s nice to know I can fully function on only a few dozen milligrams of caffeine and that my heart is no longer being pickled in aspartame.

I’m cooking more. I spend at least three or four hours on the weekend in a chopping/peeling/blender-ing trance. I finally understand why great big heavy knives are so great, though I might throw one at you if you call me a “foodie” because, dear God, that word makes me angry.

And I haven’t been to Target since early November. I wouldn’t call it a boycott, exactly, but I just decided I’d try to see how long I could avoid going there. I don’t imagine this would make any difference with them (and Illinois law overrrules their policies anyway), but I just began to resent how essential that big damn red store had become to my life, and somehow it felt better to just cut it out. I don’t mind if anyone else shops there. I just don’t feel like going there these days, and wandering around trying to find where the hell I left my cart, because I always fucking did that.

Does all this sound like I am living in a cabin in the woods? I hope that’s not the impression I’m giving here. My life isn’t suddenly more meaningful than usual. Though did I mention I’m doing yoga? I’ll tell you more about the yoga sometime. When I do more of it, that is.

Filed Under: Body, General, misc, personal

Reading in March!

February 15, 2006 by Wendy

Hey, suburban people! Jen Lancaster and I are going to be reading together from our respective Something Is/Is Not the New Something memoirs at Borders in Oakbrook on March 23rd at 7:30 pm. Come out and see us. Come on! There’s a Container Store two doors down!

Filed Under: General

My bloggy Valentine

February 14, 2006 by Wendy

Somehow I managed to find the right index.php file I needed to fix this site last night. (If you hadn’t stopped by in the past week or so I’ll spare you the techie details, but last Thursday, after I’d installed WordPress, I started playing ball in the house, so to speak, and I done broke my index page.) But I’m back up, and there’s still more things to be done with the site, but the archives are now all in one place, with old Blogger entries and Moveable Type stuff together at last. Soon I’ll update the links and the FAQs and everything will be peachy.

Hey! Tomorrow night I’ll be reading and stuff at The Book Cellar in Lincoln Square along with Zulkey and Amy K. Rosenthal for their Local Author night. The “and stuff” part will be where I give a talk on getting children’s books published (that’s my day job, don’t you know), and where you learn all my extremely cranky editor opinions. Please come. There will be wine.

And hey! Remember these single girl valentines I made a couple of years ago? I’d taken them down because about a bajillion MySpace readers were hotlinking to them, especially this one, and it was annoying, but I uploaded them to Flickr last night, where you can OMG LOL over them as much as you damn well please without sucking my bandwidth.

Anyway, I’m not as single as I was when I first posted those things, am I? I’m going to make dinner for Chris tonight and then we’re going to go country dancing, and drink some quarter beers, and nine months ago yesterday was our first date, and I’d say more, but–well, I’ll say it to him. And I don’t even have to wait until we’re drunk. Suffice it to say I think he is the guy for me.

But I haven’t forgotten about you, you know. Just because I never post and I’m always “busy” and have “articles to write” and whatnot doesn’t mean you’re not my butterfly. That’s why I wrote you a Valentine’s Day song. I hope you like it!

Filed Under: meta, personal

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The Wilder Life on Flickr

Recent Press and Links

  • Essay: A Little House Adulthood For the American Masters documentary on Laura Ingalls Wilder, I contributed a piece to the PBS website about revisiting the Little House books.
  • Essay: The Christmas Tape (At Longreads.com) How an old audio tape of holiday music became a record of family history, unspoken rituals, and grief.
  • Q & A With Wendy McClure Publishers Weekly interview about editing, Wanderville and more.

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Where else to find Wendy

  • Candyboots Home of the Weight Watcher recipe cards
  • Malcolm Jameson Site (in progress) about my great-grandfather, a Golden Age sci-fi writer.
  • That Side of the Family My semi-secret family history blog
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