So I've been in NYC the past several days and would like to note the following:

1. This play BECKY SHAW, which I saw on Christmas Eve with my sister and parents after a lovely and romantical dinner at Chez Josephine, is very very very good. I mean thoroughly enjoyable and smart and funny from beginning to end, with characters you haven't quite seen before, so you should obviously go see it immediately.

2. This movie I'VE LOVED YOU SO LONG, which I saw on Saturday with my beauteous friend Eric after drinking some rose tea and petting random elegant dogs in Soho, is gorgeous and devastating and Kristin Scott Thomas is just magnificent. My favorite movies this year I think were this one plus MILK and FROZEN RIVER. I still keep thinking about Milk; I can't remember a movie in which I fell so completely in love with everyone in it and I think it rather broke mah heart.

3. The other night I watched this special on the Madoff scandal with my sister and at one point they're interviewing some grand older leopard-print-y NYC woman who was friends with Madoff and lost a ton of dough with him, and she was really quite haughty and awesome and at one point the interviewer asked her if she was bitter and she replied, eyebrows arched, "No, I'm not bitter, because I don't think that's healthy or helpful. But I am pissed off," in this way that was completely kick ass.

4. On Sunday eve I went to a lovely soiree at Joi's and amongst other things was introduced to a boy named WIlliam from Seattle whom I immediately recognized as this guy I met on the campus of Evergreen State College when I was 18. That would be NINETEEN YEARS AGO, as I am very old. William of course had no idea who I was but I remembered him because he was romantic and dark haired and I actually named the dead lover of Mary Finn in Rain Village William because of him (and the actual place Rain Village was loosely and exagerratedly based on Olympia, Washington, with all its lush green wet sparkliness). In fact I also named the lost prince-lover in Godmother William as well before my lovely UK editor delicately pointed out that there is a very identifiable Prince Willaim alive and well today. Plus, I really ought to not have a dead or lost romantical prince-ish character named William in each book tho let's face it, William IS the perfect name for such mens.

SO I finally, a couple of days ago, went to the photo lab and made contact sheets and prints from from the rolls of film I took when Krysztof first came to NYC to visit Joi and the three of us spent a day wandering around the city and I took 50000000000 photos... It was my first time making prints by myself in the photo lab, so they aint perfect, and I'm going to go back to the lab to redo a few next month, but I still looove them. And look at these two -- such glamor!

A lovely new quote:

"Sweeping, engrossing, dark, and glittering -- Godmother is a jewel of a book. Carolyn Turgeon is a masterful storyteller, and yet this is no classical ‘re-telling’ of the Cinderella story: in Turgeon’s hands, this book becomes the Cinderella story you’ve been waiting your whole life to discover." -- Signe Pike, author of Faery Tale: One Woman’s Search for Magic in a Grown-Up World

I also meant to mention that I'm reading Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber which is SO GORGEOUS and contains amazing lines like this one:

His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.

So I got back to State College on Sunday via a 5000-hour-long train ride and then Monday drove my mother and her dog Gus up to Ithaca, NY, where Gus shall be tested by doctors at Cornell as he is afflicted with mysterious ailments that I suspect he fakes in order to be romantic and better loved. I know there is a name for that. Now we are holed up in a Best Western for a few days, which to some people might not sound so great but to me is the BEST THING EVER as I have an unnatural affection for motels, as well as new towns, and would like to live in them all the time. I will also be able to do a lot of writing as well as visit the Moosewood Restaurant and other local attractions. Plus we gonna see Milk. And last night played many rounds of canasta in the hotel lobby over cups of instant cocoa. I know, it seems like a dream doesn't it.

Also, yesterday Jennifer Belle sent in this gorgeous quote for Godmother, which by the way comes out in EARLY MARCH and will change your life:

"Turgeon must have a magic wand for a pen--these haunting, dazzling pages turn themselves." --Jennifer Belle, author of High Maintenance and Little Stalker

Plus I'm also not sure I ever posted these two:

"GODMOTHER's a book of heartbroken magic for anyone who stayed up past midnight and wondered where the fairy tale went. A beautiful, aching book." -- Warren Ellis, author of Crooked Little Vein

“The story Carolyn Turgeon has crafted, wrought with equal parts beauty and despair, and with just enough ambiguity to appeal to all kinds of readers, is simply heart-rending.” -- Jeanine Cummins, bestselling author of A Rip in Heaven

The end.

So I had a very fun, chock full and action packed week in NYC, running around every day to see friends over lunches and dinners and cups of coffee and glasses of wine--oh and I also saw my friend David's amazing play, and I saw Slumdog Millionaire, and I met with my publicist and editor and film peoples, and in spare moments I got glammed up at salons by small Russian ladies and worked on my new book, which I figured out TODAY, the last bits of it that is... and I got a mound of fantastical jewelry designed by Andrew Hamilton Crawford, the jewelry company where my friend Orly now works... I MEAN LOOK AT THIS NECKLACE AND RING... (the necklace says BAM! in true superhero fashione)..



and I also of course hung out with my best friend Aoife and traded cutting-edge fashion tips..



--and then today I got the train up to the Grail in Cornwall-on-Hudson, where my friend Massie now lives in a gorgeous grey sprawling farmhouse with her friend, the lovely dress-sewing cupcake-baking photo-taking Marcie, and it is about as quaint as can be up here.. I mean, when Massie and I walked over to the cottage house to get wine for dinner (there are several buildings/houses on this property), we walked over a field under the full moon as a herd of deer bounded by and, in the distance, the awesomely named Storm King Mountain glimmered with ice. For dinner Marcie made a broccoli soup that filled the house with the scent of garlic and ginger... tomorrow she's spending the whole day baking for the holiday party they're throwing tomorrow night, which will, among other things, feature mulled rum cider and white chocolate cupcakes... And every room has wide planked wooden floors and heavy old furniture and oil lamps.

It is the kind of house where aprons hang on doors



and dresses and old typewriters populate attics



and paper stars hang from chandeliers



and bedrooms look like they're full of secrets



and all kinds of glamour ensues









Oh! I also failed to write about the gorgeous rendezvous I had the week before last in Hershey, Pennsylvania, with my wondrous poker playing friend Ken, and I didn't write about how lovely a time I had in Philadelphia a few weeks ago, visiting the Mutter museum and doing cat puzzles and having apple cider with cinnamon sticks and wandering around Society Hill arm in arm... And playing canasta on Thanksgiving with my family... And how now I can now play God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen on my accordion.

I KNOW.

It must be heard to be believed.

The end.

So I came back to NYC again yesterday and went straight from the train station to the wondrous Porcupine Tattoo, where Emma, who has done such beautiful work on Joi the past year or two, gave me my first tattoo in 17 years. I got a tattoo when I was 18 and another when I was 20, and ever since I've thought I really ought to get a good one and/or get those ones fixed up -- the worst is the fairy on my thigh, done on the Greek island Rhodes by an Englishman who carried a tattoo kit around with him! she's just a jailhouse looking outline and not even the outline is done properly -- but I have really just been farrrrr too lazy. So for this one I thunk and thunk and figured it ought to be special and I wrote a list of images I love and finally decided to get DAPHNE TURNING INTO A LAUREL TREE. And Emma drew it up based on a Mucha painting and then yesterday did the outline and a little bit of color. She'll finish it in January. Look:





And then in February I am getting a little complementary piece -- flower women! -- done on the back of this arm and down to the forearm. It shall be looovely and weird and elegante.

In other news I am now obsessed with Arvo Part's "Fratres for Violin, Strings and Percussion" after hearing my friend Svetlin perform it with a small group of musicians at his violin recital Friday evening. It's unbelievably strange and gorgeous. I went home and bought it and can't stop listening to it now. Oh and the movie Frozen River. And the new James Bond movie! I've decided Daniel Craig really ought to play the fur-wearing gloomy 14th century Viking prince who's gonna be the LOVE INTEREST in my new mermaid book. I mean really. Admit that gave you shivers.