Last weekend, I found myself in the Fremont, Nebraska, HyVee, pictured above. It’s the setting for a lot of action in my manuscript which I’m calling This Glorious Middle State. I started sending it off to literary agents a couple weeks ago. I don’t know how I ended up writing a novel that takes place in Fremont, more or less, but one word begets another. There’s a proportionality of language that draws me along, a curiosity about a word choice or sound or string of words or sounds that I’d like to investigate further. And then a year and a half later I’ve got a novel manuscript that I really love and will be absolutely heartbroken about if none of the literary gatekeepers deems it publishable.

Well, shit. Enough bellyaching. This mix—I like it a lot, though it lacks the proportionality or sequencing that makes me really fall for a good mix. The Stella Donnelly song “Flood” had been hanging around for a while (it came out last year) before I finally committed it to a mix, and now I think it’s the most charming pop song in the world. There’s something about a song that gives you three good melodies in a row that seems so opulent. It reminds me of chord changes in 70s and 80s songs, I suppose. I doubt I know what I’m talking about. I purposefully haven’t studied music because I don’t want my left brain to ruin it for me.