UPDATE: How Long do You Keep a Friend Alive on FB?

It was one of those weird events in life, the kind that makes me a little more sensitive to the alternate realities that exist concurrent to this one or at least to the consequences that our actions have--you decide how to interpret....I wrote about my friend, Nancy Festinger,  a month ago.  It was her birthday, as FB reminded me not knowing she had died and the birthday reminder made me think of her.  What I didn't put in the blog--because it seemed apropos of nothing--is that the last time I saw Nancy was at a friend's memorial service seven years ago in Boston.  She told me then she loved my first book and that, as a translator, it was just the kind of book that translators love because it had a kind of humor that didn't translate word for word and translators love that challenge:  how to make the right shade of humor come across in the new language.  She told me she gave it to some translator friends and they were all loving it--which I am telling you because last week I got an email from a  young man in a translation class in the Universite de Sherbrooke in Quebec, Canada, and he wanted to know about the translation rights because he wanted to translate it then find a French publisher.  There are a lot of good fiction books out there and that my books got into this person's hands is thanks to Nancy.  I'm sure of it.  A very belated thank you.  The ripples of our actions are felt for years.

Manadala by Clarence H. Carter