Upside down and inside out, I'm about to show all you folks what's it's all about.*

After a lot of doubt in choosing stories and some kind of order followed by a round of really helpful edits with my agent, I'm thinking of following my gut and including a story that I'd decided to leave out.

Mom has been buying me Cherokee language book for upwards of 25 years. After searching all over the Internet for the word "grandson," I remembered I have an entire, woefully underused library. 

Wish I had put the books to better use the past quarter decade, but here we are. 

Oh, and the word is "u-li-si a-tsu-tsa." In another decade or so, maybe I can help you pronounce it.

*(sorry)

Coming back to this: It's probably worth saying that I have lots of thoughts, when I'm not working on this story, about using the Cherokee language in a story when in order to use almost any piece of the language I have to go to dusty reference books hopefully purchased on trips to the Cherokee Nation Gift Shop. I talked about this some when Michael Noll of Read to Write Stories interviewed me a while back. I have lots of thoughts and feelings about this, but when I'm working on the story, I really don't. I'm happy for that. 

Still, I may find when I finish the story that using the language the way I'm trying to just doesn't work. Or, worse, maybe I will find that I've done so poorly. Or maybe I won't be comfortable using it now at all. It seems so hard to use a language you don't know, much less the difficulty of "should." I want to think that rhythms of speech somehow imprinted themselves upon me when I was a child back in Oklahoma. But I don't think those wants are particularly born of reality. We will see. 

There are lots of other thoughts floating around about structure and order, something I worked so hard on when I "completed" my ms. If I add this little piece, a new accidental story that's certainly going in, and one other old one that may help fill in some narrative gaps, EVERYTHING about my tidy, little 3 section order is out the window. I think it is anyway, but that's probably another post so....