My grandson and his wife are coming to dinner to give me some advice. I am so blessed. They are both writers, but not like me. If I were starting out today to hang my shingle as a "writer", I'm sure I wouldn't make it. I'd be selling craft jewellery and kitschy stuff at a gift shoppe. Even in my time, it was accepted wisdom not to attempt to make one's living as a writer. "Don't quit yer day job,"i was told. (I didn't have a day job.) I began to realize I was setting a precedent when journalism students started calling me for my story and the Canadian Authors' Association asked me to speak, as the Canadian widow tells all, and following that, McMillan Publishing offered me a contract to write a book on How to .Succeed as a Writer in Canada, when I hadn't even sent them a pitch.

There are more outlets for one's writing today. Free platforms abound, but the markets are tougher. I have lived so long that I have outlived, not only my doctors, but more importantly, my agents and my contacts in both the publishing and theatre fields. So, as I am finishing my new book, I'm looking around for a market, especially in e-books and self-published books. Enter my talented grandson and grand-daughter-in-law. I have to find out how to establish an online presence so I can sell myself, and my book. I've been writing my blog for about a year now and I have about three devoted readers. I need more than that, no offence intended.

Not that I want to go viral. That looks awful. I'm certainly not trying to compete with a Grumpy Cat or a homeless man playing the piano. (That's the extent of my knowledge of going viral.) I just want to enlarge my audience and sell a few books. I'm hoping the next generation will tell me how to do it.

I'm planning a nice dinner.

I'm going to learn Icelandic today. (I might have the wrong declension on the word Icelandic.)

All day.

I have so many things going on, I have been neglecting my homework. Yeah yeah I've been busy. That's everyone's excuse now and it's true and valid and justified - all that. But it's also a matter of choice. There are so many projects and commitments and pleasures vying for attention that it's all too easy to choose only one or two and let the others slide. When guilt or shame outweighs pleasure, it's time to come to terms with one's commitment. So today I choose Icelandic.

I was talking to my granddaughters the other day, both gifted young women (I told you that already), and they were discussing their travel adventures and their efforts to learn other languages. One of them, who spent a couple of summers in Africa setting up outpost clinics for children (as an undergrad medical student), learned Swahili. She climbed Mount Kilimanjaro before she went home one year and was so fluent that she managed to complain about her physical aches in Swahili. She said to her guide that even her little finger was sore. And the other one, the artist, a product of French immersion in her Toronto schooling, and of a mother (my daughter) who spoke French to her at home and took her to Montreal to practice, described the day, after she had spent several months in Europe, when "the veil dropped" and she was understanding and thinking in French. Wow.

Well, I studied Latin and Classical Greek at university (so I have a very large vocabulary and a good grasp of grammar) and I took a double honours degree in French and English. I was almost bilingual, though I never had a veil drop, maybe once when I'd had too much wine. So what am I doing, studying Icelandic? I am so sorry I didn't learn it when I was a child, listening to but not understanding my mother and her mother and sisters gossiping over coffee. It would be so easy now, I can tell, even from the few remnants that my grandmother taught me; i can pronounce the word for bread exquisitely.

The trees outside my window are laden with snow. It's a lovely day to stay inside and study. So blessed!