Hello all!

Shocking: A day off! It's been a nutty week, more stuff getting ready for Madness publication. Fun news! I'll be on the Diane Rehm Show on National Public Radio on April 7. Will post the time when I know it, but I hope you will all tune in. She's a great interviewer, and it should be a lot of fun. Meanwhile, I had a great chat with a reporter from Glamour Magazine on Friday—that interview will run in the April issue. And lots of work this week on the new novel, long chats with a couple of people about how that's developing, a few new scenes written. Whoosh! By Friday night, I was ready to crawl into bed with my shoes on.

So today I'm lounging around in Chicago visiting an old friend. We're (get this) going ice skating. I don't think I've been on ice skates since I was twenty, when I had a spectacular argument with my then-boyfriend about how skating was done—he seemed very certain that there was a correct way, and I needed to know it—I didn't agree. Sadly, that relationship was not long for this world, but so it goes. Thus, I will attempt to skate today without knowing the correct way—in all likelihood, it will be a grand failure, but who cares? It's a fine thing when you get to the point in your life where you really don't care how silly you look landing on your butt anymore, as long as you're having a good time. It's tragic I no longer have the fabulous purple skating dress my father gave me for my sixth birthday. Oh, that dress! Beloved purple skating dress! I was such a sight in that dress, soaring around the skating rink at the Sun Valley Mall in northern California! For the youngsters among you, that would have been, um, 1980. For those of you my age and older, how did we get so old??