I'm still struggling with it, and have sent a few projects out that straddle the YA/Adult line, but perhaps don't quite fit the NA parameters...but haven't found my groove. I think I'd prefer to be more fully in either bucket.

Totally sucks. Accessibility is such a thing and so many places don't have small craft or fabric stores but do have a Joann. And when I need some batting or basics, it's always a place I knew I could go without having to order online. It's going to send a lot of people to Hobby Lobby and...yikes.

For Adult, some of the same. Nothing too self-serious. I love a fun concept with a strong voice. Thinking of THURSDAY MURDER CLUB or FINLEY DONOVAN as a good example. I'm up for SFF but more accessible and commercial. Or cozy!

For MG and YA, I could use some projects to reinvigorate things. Humor and optimism and joy would be nice. Fanciful, fantastic twists. Books that have FUN and let readers have fun. (I really can't handle depressing stories right now.)

MG, YA or adult, I'm always looking for high-concept, commercial reads. Great plots and hooks. Strong voices and characters in those well-drawn worlds and situations. I'm up for some genre blending. A rom-com in a dystopian world? Agatha Christie in space? Murder mystery and dragons? Do it.

Yes.

And yours as well.

And agree. This would have destroyed them all over again.

100%. It's a weird way to justify a change NOW. Lashon hara rules really boil down to "if you're not talking about Torah, you're probably committing lashon hara." So...basically all human interaction. Using it here feels like "Quick! Someone make this statement more Jewish."

This is a stretch from the statement, but part of the lashon hara prohibitions are also about hearing it or believing it being just as bad as saying it....so I guess don't be on a platform where it abounds? Not like that wasn't true before, but...

You know, I vaguely remember your family being from Munkacs. I grew up with a lot survivors from there and my bubbie's town. Somehow they found each other here.

Epigenetic trauma is interesting. I don't really know how to explain all the ways their experiences still play out in my life. The subtle ways my father adapted to his parents' trauma, which now play out in how I engage the world as a Jew. I wish more people knew. It's real and not all in the past.

My grandparents have been dead many years now. I miss them every day. I wish more people could have benefited from knowing a Holocaust survivor personally. I look around now and I am just terrified we're walking into this all over again. And only some of us see it.

But they both survived. And went "home"...to my grandmother's hometown of Uzhhorod (now in Ukraine). They met at a soup kitchen. They got married. They fled west. Had my uncle in a DP camp in Germany. Eventually got sponsored by the JDC and made it to the US and built a whole new life.

My grandfather was sent on a death march, where his job was to drag dead bodies to the side of the road. He narrowly escaped through a loose board of a barn wall, in which he'd been locked inside with other prisoners, just before the Nazis bulldozed the building. Only a few got out.

Our first winter in our house we had the sewer line bust. Also from roots of a now-dead tree on the easement. In our case they had to dig up the whole road because the main was on the other side of the street. $25k later...insurance doesn't usually cover sewer lines, I hate to say....