I’ve been on “vacation” for nearly a week now, and boy has it been great. I’ve given myself permission not to do any writing if I don’t feel like it, and so far I haven’t. Mostly what I’ve been doing is working my way through the stack of books that’s been sitting in a pile for weeks (in some cases months and years.) I don’t allow myself enough time to read, usually, unless I’m reading something specific for my writing. It kind of makes me sad, too, because for my whole life I’ve been a voracious reader. I used to go through several novels a week. Of course, that was before the Internet. Man, is my laptop a time-suck, and I’m not just talking about the time I spend writing on it. Blogs, Facebook, email, Twitter, chatting with my husband while he’s at work, etc. etc. It can consume the whole day if I’m not careful. There’s always something else to click.

On Christmas day I decided to spend some quality time reading fiction. I haven’t read fiction in a long time, aside from flash-fic, because I barely have the attention span for it anymore. And since I don’t write fiction, it feels like slacking to read novels when I could be reading poetry, memoir, and books on writing craft. In fact, the last time I allowed myself to read a novel was in August when I spent a week at the Shore. So on Christmas I started with the new Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood. I bought it hard-cover a few months ago when it was released, and then it sat under my bedside table gathering dust. Took me almost four days to read that sucker. Yeah, it’s a pretty thick book, but that’s a looong time for one novel. I felt like I was reading every spare moment, so I’m appalled by how much my reading has slowed down. No wonder I don’t have time to read anymore! Boy, it was good, though. I got sucked in just the way I used to. I love that feeling.

Next up: John Irving. Bought at the same time as the Atwood book. Equally huge. I have six days of vacation left, so I should be able to finish it and maybe read a third book besides. I’m excited. It’s that old feeling I used to get when I was a kid and would come home from the library with a big stack of new books. God, is there anything better?

In other news, the day after Christmas I got a holiday card from my former teacher Carolyne Wright. I opened it, read her Christmas greeting, then saw the scrawled P.S. It said, “I nominated you for a Pushcart Prize. Expect to hear from Bill Henderson in Feb.”

I blinked.

I blinked again.

It still said the words “nominated” and “Pushcart.”

Now, I know that thousands of writers have been nominated for Pushcarts. I don’t want to make myself out to be better than I really am.  But WAAAAHOOOOOOO! Talk about a deep, dark wish coming true! As it turns out, she (as a contributing editor, I assume) was able to nominate me as a poet, rather than for a specific poem, which means I get to send 3 or 4 poems to be considered. They have to be poems that were published in 2009, of course, and given Murphy’s Law of Pushcart Nominations, my very best poems were published in 2008 or are forthcoming in 2010. Ha! But there are a couple that might have a tiny chance. I’m not going to look a gift nomination in the mouth, that’s for darn sure.

Tonight hubs and I will be having a little champagne and going to the movies to see Sherlock Holmes in celebration of the honor, and then tomorrow I’ll try to forget about it until they announce the winners. I can’t afford to spend a lot of time thinking about it because I’ve got reading to do.  And if I go any slower I’ll never finish!