The Last Dozen

Four of the Blue Rose Girls in 2006

Google told me I had run out of storage — even though I have 15 gigabytes. So I looked for big files to delete and found videos from when 6 children's book illustrators, authors, and one editor had the Blue Rose Girls blog. A male author was making a promotional video and asked us BRGs to contribute a spoof of SEX AND THE CITY.

His video was about publishing and how agents and editors had all the power. We came up with a silly skit: 3 of us  talking about our editors the way the SEX AND THE CITY characters talked about their boyfriends.  One take began with Anna sighing heavily and then saying,

“So, Grace, how have you been?’’ as though she knew the answer wouldn't be good.

We each told a made-up story of the perfidy of editors (men). After Anna had described HER editor having coffee with another author at their restaurant, 

            “They were sitting at our table and he was even feeding her cupcakes!’’ (Grace made and we ate a lot of cupcakes in those days),  we recorded this:

If anyone had told me that afternoon where we'd all be and what we'd all be doing twelve years later, I would have been astonished. Humans aren't very good at predicting the future.

I've stopped writing children's books; fallen in love with a remote Scottish island, bought land there, put a shepherd's hut on it, and now spend half the year there (when we're not having a pandemic!). I've also bought a condo here in Stonington. In 2008 I was supporting myself by writing children's books  amd earning about $6000/year from that and thus also babysitting. So I would never have believed I'd have the money to do either let alone both — nor could I have predicted finding that island and being so welcomed. 

The changes in the others' lives have been more dramatic, but it's for them to tell about those, not me, so I'll just say that they include some leaving children's books (I'm not the only one who's done that!), others winnnig major awards, and, more marriages and and deaths than I would guessed. 

Before they all got married we spent the weekend together about once a month; now, some of us Zoom every Sunday morning. I couldn't have predicted the reasons for that change. Nor when I had my first computer, the Macintosh 512 — that's  512 kilobytes —could I have imagined 15 gigabytes, even if I'd known what a gigabyte was.