Let Me Count the Nerdy Ways

How do authors chill out after they make their revision deadline? Let me count the nerdy ways:

1)  We find a too-good-to-be true deal on an all-in-one printer, order it in haste, and then worry obsessively when it's delivered while we're gone to the North Carolina mountains for Thanksgiving and it (temporarily) disappears from our front doorstep. We hug our neighbors when we find that they have rescued the box from the rain and have our purchase safely stored for our return. We superstitiously "christen" it by printing out a poem as the first "print job," and then play with the features on our dream machine (it can print graph paper! it can wirelessly connect with my laptop! it can download pictures from a Bluetooth camera--if I had one!) and wish we writers also came with a "Remove Red Eye" button for those late writing nights.

2) We write villanelles with our Poetry Sisters, agreeing that we must use the words "friends" and "thanksgiving." We don't have to use iambic pentameter, but we do. We don't have to fiddle with it lovingly, but we do. We know that other people would think this homework, but we consider it fun, right up there with paging through food catalogs that sell gourmet bacon and licorice from Australia.  We  count the days until this Poetry Friday when all seven Poetry Sister villanelles will be revealed at once...

3) We read lists. We love ones with titles like "Over 200 movies about the writing life" (compiled by author Susan Taylor Brown.)  And "Bookish Holiday Gifts: A Selection of Finds From Etsy."

4) Instead of cleaning our desks, we blog about silly things (in a list format, of course.) Then we go clean our desks. Really. We do.