My new friend, Betty Lou, started a book club, and she asked me to join.

I was delighted. I hadn't been in a book club for a long time. Because she is a librarian, Betty Lou knows better than most the importance of reading a variety of things and so, at the very first meeting, we read a graphic novel.

None of the members of this group are young, and this was the first graphic novel most of us had read. We weren't sure what to say about it.

"This book is very heavy!" one member finally said.

"It's a doorstop!" said another.

We all agreed we were not crazy about the weight of the book. I wondered if a book club should really be concerned with how much a book weighs, but I figured it was a legitimate concern if you could injure yourself by dropping it. And we did, eventually, get to what was inside.

"There were a lot of pictures," I pointed out.

Since it was a graphic novel, this should not have been a surprise. Still, there were a lot more pictures than I expected, and I didn't want to look at them all. I wanted to get on with the story. But the story wasn't being told with a lot of words -- it was being told with pictures. I realized this, but it didn't make me want to look at the pictures, it just made me want more words. I began to think that I was not a good reader for graphic novels.

"Are we just too old for this?" one of the members asked. The question hung in the air.

"It's an important story!" another member said, and we all agreed.

We talked about all the important things the book was saying, and we all agreed they were things that should be said.

"But shouldn't it be more entertaining?" I asked.

I felt a little like the boy pointing out that the emperor had no clothes. Everyone looked a little relieved. We all agreed that it should be more entertaining than it was -- at least for us. We suspected other people (younger people) might have more fun reading this than we were.

I don't think of myself as being too old for very much. I know younger people are better at some things (anything involving technology), but I don't consider myself too old to learn. Still, there might be things I am simply too old to enjoy. Graphic novels might be one of them. I'm not sure if that's a bad thing or not.

There are things I know I will not try because I am no longer young -- skateboarding, for instance, video games, learning more languages or how to draw. Theoretically, I could learn to do any of these things, and yet I am pretty sure I will not.

It occurs to me it would be good to take at least one of those activities off the "Things I Will Never Do" list and move it over to the "Things I Just Started Doing" list. And yet my day already seems filled with the things I'm doing, things I already enjoy.

And so I'm glad Betty Lou got us to read a graphic novel, even if it was not my favorite book. Now I can say I've read one, and I am reminded that there are many ways of telling stories, even if not all of those stories are interesting to me.

It was a good reminder. It's just the sort of reminder you might expect from a librarian.

Till next time,

Carrie

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Yesterday wasn't the best day.

I don't like to complain and, the truth is, I have very little to complain about. Still, yesterday was not the best day.

I woke with a stomachache. I'd gone to bed with a stomachache, and this is not terribly unusual. My mother gets stomachaches, and now my 20-year-old niece is prey to them. Stress and irregular eating set them off, these stomachs of ours, and sometimes they take hours or even days to get sorted out. This one was particularly stubborn and saw me through the night and into the next day. By midmorning, I realized, unless I was writing about a stomachache, I wasn't likely to get much writing done.

So I thought I'd learn a new program I'd promised myself I'd learn. The young woman on the video assured me that this training was for "absolute beginners," and I felt reassured. I sat down with my stomachache and started watching.

I had no idea what she was talking about.

It wasn't that she left me behind -- I never got on the bus. The bus pulled away and left me standing on the curb. I suddenly felt old. I was an old woman with a stomachache.

Then I heard from my agent. My agent is cheerful and hopeful and loves my book, and she's working hard right now to sell it. She wrote to tell me I got another rejection. She sounded pretty down -- for a perpetually upbeat person. She sounded as if we might be running out of people to send my book to. This was depressing news.

That's when I saw the Facebook post.

A friend objected to my recent column where I looked through the stained glass in a church and found color -- and reason to be happy. It wasn't realistic, he wrote. Bad things happen, and people like me should acknowledge them. He talked about tornados and shootings. He said people like me would go looking for a pony in a pile of horse poop. He wasn't very nice. And I still had a stomachache.

Nothing makes me feel better when I am down than a nice hot bath by candlelight, and it was certainly time for one of those. But the bathtub faucet was not working, and so the hot water filled the tub very slowly -- so slowly that, by the time there was enough for a bath, it was lukewarm.

"Oh well!" I said as I hopped in. "A lukewarm bath by candlelight is better than no bath at all."

That's when the candle fizzled out.

I sat in the lukewarm water in the dark. I still had a stomachache as I mulled over the rejection of my manuscript. I remembered my friend's accusation that I was not realistic. I realized he was right.

But, as I considered the options, I honestly couldn't think of another way to live. Life is short, no matter how long we live. Knowing that my time is short, and my abilities limited, encourages me to do whatever I can with this precious time I have -- right now -- sitting in lukewarm water. I get a choice about how I wish to feel about all of it, even the stomachache. And I believe (realistic or not) that it is a precious gift to live in this continually amazing, astonishingly beautiful world.

I feel better today. The sky is still gray. The faucet is still broken. There is still no word on my book. But my stomachache is marginally better. And I am enormously grateful to experience all of it.

Till next time,

Carrie

Photos and other news can be found at CarrieClasson.com.

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I have a sticker that says "My Happy Place," and I kept it for a while, wondering where to put it. In the end, I stuck it near my desk so I could see it while I write. I am usually happy when I'm writing.

On Monday, however, I was not happy. I had a major technology breakdown, and I had no idea what I had done wrong. As it turned out, I had done nothing wrong (which is rare, when it comes to technology). Microsoft had a failure that lasted for almost two hours. During the technology breakdown, I had an accompanying emotional breakdown. For two hours, I was not in my happy place.

Only after it was over did I look back on the experience and realize how easy all this annoying technology makes my life every day.

I've heard of writers who use old typewriters, or write entire novels by hand, and then type them up on their computers. They even have a device that only lets you see a couple of lines at a time and has no access to the internet. I guess this is because some writers consider the internet an obstacle to writing. This seems very silly to me. Without the internet, how would I know that avenues run perpendicular to streets and that lanes can run in either direction? How would I find funny cat videos?

I hear writers complain that they would get more done if they were in a cabin in the woods like Henry David Thoreau, but they forget Thoreau had somebody copying his manuscript for him and his sister bringing him lunch every day. All our imaginings of how the past might have been better for writing are romantic nonsense. Right now, at my little desk, I know I have it better than any previous generation of writers ever has.

I had a chance once to see an original manuscript written by Charles Dickens. It was behind glass, and I no longer remember which novel it was. But it was thrilling to see, in his handwriting, how he had come up with his stories, just like anyone else.

And like anyone who writes, he had circled sentences and entire paragraphs and drawn an arrow to where he wanted them moved. Of course, this was all done with a goose-quill pen. It must have taken Dickens a long time to finish anything, even if he got some help. I wondered if he would have written more if he'd had a computer. My hunch is that we would have at least one more novel by Dickens if he'd had word processing.

Now, a lot of people are concerned about how artificial intelligence might replace writers. I am not terribly worried. I suspect AI will be another tool -- like word processing. It's unimaginable to us now, but we'll learn it and then wonder how we ever got along without it.

I don't think we'll give computers the job of telling stories because we like telling stories too much. Telling stories to one another is about the most human thing there is. A story comes from one person and is told to another person. We've been figuring out ways to do this since we were gathered around a fire. I don't think anything will stop us -- no matter how much that storytelling changes.

In the meantime, I'll keep writing. Microsoft sent me a nice note explaining that what happened on Monday was their fault. I'm thinking of having it framed -- and hanging it in my happy place.

Till next time,

Carrie

Photos and other news can be found at CarrieClasson.com.

DISTRIBUTED BY ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION