Welcome to the first Monday of August, or as I suspect I’ll be thinking of it, Revision Month. That’s right, the editorial letter for my forthcoming novel arrived recently. I’ve gone through the notes, produced notes of my own, and just two days ago sat down with my editor for a two hour meeting to make sure we were both on the same page (so to speak). My main writing goal for the next few weeks is to implement the changes, additions, deletions, and assorted line edits in the manuscript. Sounds like great fun, right?
Meanwhile though, it’s Monday, and this week that means we are graced with the presence of Judith Moffett, author, poet, academician, and translator, and she’s won awards, prizes, and grants scattered across all four areas of expertise. Limiting our focus to her prose fiction works, I can tell you that she won the first ever Theodore Sturgeon Award for her short story “Surviving,” and dis so in the same year that her first novel, Pennterra, came out. The following year, Judith took home the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She’s since followed these with other short stories, novellae, and novels, including her Holy Ground trilogy (The Ragged World, published in 1991, followed by Time, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream in 1992, and concluding with The Bird Shaman, published in 2008).
Utterly unbeknownst to me, she’d been living in the greater Philadelphia area for decades. Alas, she recently moved out of state, making it considerably harder to camp out on her doorstep in the hope that some of her talent will rub off on me. Instead, I’ll have to settle for her musings on her most memorable meal.
