So much for writing weekly entries. What with passing a significant birthday, the accompanying hangover, a paper, a novel and an article to deliver, forty short stories to mark – all by next Monday – and an impending trip to New York (on Tuesday), this is going to be a rushed entry. I’ve heard the Vampire Weekend album, out next week, and it’s wonderful – barely half an hour long and all the better for it. My not seeing them in New York a week tomorrow looks like being compensated by my meeting up with one of my favourite crime writers. More on this and whatever else I get up to at the AWP conference when I return in a couple of weeks’ time.<\/p>\n
The title of this post is, I hope, ironic rather than despairing. I plan to see the movie of that name tonight. And middle age sure beats the alternative. Saturday night’s party was great and I’m very lucky in my friends, who danced a lot and gave me loads of great books, CDs and other groovy gifts, along with some wonderful art made with me in mind – a painting, a poem and a T-shirt – which I’ll treasure. And there was no lasting damage, unless you count the fuzzy stayed-up-too-late hangover that I haven’t quite dispelled yet. It’s like having jetlag in advance.<\/p>\n
Now, back to those short stories…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So much for writing weekly entries. What with passing a significant birthday, the accompanying hangover, a paper, a novel and an article to deliver, forty short stories to mark – all by next Monday – and an impending trip to New York (on Tuesday), this is going to be a rushed entry. I’ve heard the Vampire Weekend album, out next week, and it’s wonderful – barely half an hour long and all the better for it. My not seeing them in New York a week tomorrow looks like being compensated by my meeting up with one of my favourite crime writers. More on this and whatever else I get up to at the AWP conference when I return in a couple of weeks’ time. The…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}