I do love Margaret Atwood interviews. She is invariably entertaining. For this one today on the L.A. Times blog:

Interviewer: Your book “The Handmaid’s Tale” has become a seminal feminist work taught in universities all over.

Atwood: You know you’ve really made it when people start dressing up like that on Halloween.

I’m in post-Thanksgiving-dinner recovery: bloated and tired. The dishes are almost done, the furniture almost all back in place. My husband is simmering the turkey carcass for stock. A bit of left-over pumpkin pie with whipped cream was perhaps not exactly what I needed … but impossible to resist.

I’m on my last two chapters (which may expand to three or four). I didn’t expect too much of myself this holiday weekend, but I did manage to write each morning. And now, with the coast clear, I could dive back in, but I don’t feel ready. I had hoped to be finished by this weekend, and although that didn’t happen, I do feel that I can finish over the coming two weeks … weeks which will get progressively busier as we prepare to move to Mexico for the winter months.

So—for today: research, catalogue books, read Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, nap?

Answer: all of the above, or rather …

To PO’THER. v.a. To make a blustering ineffectual effort.
He that loves reading and writing, yet finds certain seasons
wherein those things have no relish, only pothers and wearies
himself to no purpose. Locke.