What a Coinky-Dink!

This spring, I finally got around to dusting off an old manuscript--my first novel attempt--and getting down to some serious revisions. After two more read-throughs this past week, I'm feeling really good about it. Granted, I once felt really good about my earlier drafts, too, which just the thought of now makes me criiiinge. But room for improving is infinite, so while I'll always be aspiring for that as a writer, I think I've got this little gal ready to query again.

This story is close to my heart for very personal reasons, but also because it indulges concepts that have always met my fancy. Ghosts, séances, déjà vu, synchronicity... I'm a total sucker for coincidences, always hoping to find connections between them even though it's perfectly plausible that they just happen at random. The human mind is such fertile ground for misperception and the consequences of when we see things the wrong way...or perhaps when we view them the right way but question our own memories and judgment.

In any case, I love crazy coincidences, like one Father's Day when my brother was talking about going to a ball game in Cleveland and how the fans kept singing "Hang on Sloopy," which we Illinoisans furrowed our brows at, wondering what the hell significance that song had for Cleveland or the state of Ohio; my dad didn't even know the song, and I said how I hadn't heard it in ages. And then...my other brother gave my dad a speaker to pimp out his TV, and to test it, he turned on one of those TV music channels, which...yes. Was playing "Hang on Sloopy," along with a factoid on the screen about how Ohio adopted it as its state song in the '80s. That is not a "meaningful" coincidence to me, per se, but still. Come ON. That's weird, right?

I notice things like this so much that I once started writing them down to see if I'd ever find a pattern among them. But I stopped that habit, before I could become a crazy lady with maps and articles taped to the walls and a web-work of yarn tacked between them as if it would one day all come together like the end of an M. Night Shyamalan movie.

So that being said, I'm reading nothing into what happened today. It simply makes me happy that after pouring my mind and heart back into the story of a character who loves coincidences, too, today on the Tube ride to the British Book Affair here in London, I cracked open my book of JD Salinger short stories right to an old favorite, "For Esme with Love and Squalor," and the very first sentence ended with "in England on April 18th."

In England on April 18th. Yes, I am.

Cheers, Margot. Here's to coincidence and querying.