Hey, is anyone doing #FirstDraftFall with WeeknightWriters? I am thinking about it. I have a project I want to work on and a little external structure would probably help with that...and people I already know also doing it would be even better...

I've never heard of that, t. Submitting things I care about less takes some of the sting out of rejection, but it makes it hard to care about revising that stuff. How do I know when it matters?

I just came across it erika, I guess it's meant to fill that NaNoWriMo hole that may or may not need filling? [link] I haven't really delved into it at all yet

I think there's room, both in general, and due to that insulting disability and AI conversation.

A blog post on what passes for my editing process, here. [link]

Susan Stamberg. Walter Cronkite. Roger Mudd. Charles Kuralt. Peter Jennings.

These were the voices I trusted, not to inflame me, but to inform me, to tell me what was happening in the world.

And they're all gone now. Cronkite and Mudd got my mother and me through Watergate, though I hardly knew what was going on. And Cronkite's work on Vietnam was definitive, although before my time (I was born in '67.)

Kuralt was a friend, almost, after he retired. He and my mother rattled around coastal California in our old VW microbus, looking at properties and swapping stories. She used to come back from those drives with the sort of serenity that comes of long conversations about things that really matter. I wish she had gotten to have more of those. But I was enormously grateful to him for his friendship with her.

Stamberg was a voice on the radio from my earliest memories, always trying to make sense of things, always looking for the way through. I didn't always agree with her, even as a kid, but I never thought she deliberately lied or obfuscated. I miss the warmth of her voice terribly, just as I miss my mother's.

This is too long for Natter, so I'm putting it here. If it needs to get longer, I'll put it on my site and link it.

I will have that feeling when Lesley Stahl dies, Karl. Even before I knew what "journalism" was, quite, I did kind of love seeing the little blonde chick that LS was at the time, make old, fat, Congressmen run away. If people could say "bitchin'" in preschool, I might have.(I guess I put that in the back of my mind, as "I'd like to do *that*, and I'm still sorry I haven't.) I know I've told this story a bunch, but since I went to the Cronkite journalism school, and Mr. Cronkite, unlike the White House's current unruly tenant, didn't just put his name on things without seeing that things were copacetic, he picked a class, like once or twice a year and sat in and such. When it was my turn, I forget what I asked about...Contract With America, maybe, and I wasn't sure that it was a great question--having, in addition, not quite learned that "Great Question!" is often a euphemism for "Aw, Christ, not *that* bullshit again,' anyway. But, anyway, that little bit of self-doubt made me retreat even further into being shy and soft-spoken than I was in college.(I'm still quieter in real life than when I talk here, but it's not a chasm anymore.) Anyway, I stated my little anti- Gingrich piece...

and Uncle Walter asked me to repeat it because he was a little deaf on one side, but I should feel in good company since he asked Jackie Kennedy to do that all the time, too.(Nobody is mixing us up, but I was crazy-flattered.) Uncle Walter knew his audience.

Oh, that's a great story. I would have liked to have met him; he certainly came across the airwaves as a fundamentally decent human being.

I'd say the best thing was that he was what you'd expect.