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 |  Just play: don't look at your hands! |
What a dumb title for a person who never got a single star  on her piano lessons!Daily practice is the thing though: the practice of noticing as well as of writing.  However, I'd much rather play duets than solos, so hop right in! You can do the melody or the base part, I don't care.  Just play along--we'll make up the tune as we go. I'll try to write regularly and deliberately. Sometimes I will do it poorly, tritely, stiltedly, obscurely. I will try to persevere regardless. It seems to be where my heart wants to go, and that means to me that God wants me there too. See you tomorrow. ![Merit Badge in Journaling
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| Haven't had time to write much today, even though I'd carefully planned my schedule. Nothing worked out, but it was a beautiful day to drive to see my farthest away patient. The roads went through huge hills of newly sprouted winter wheat, as green as Ireland. Then I turned into a canyon that narrowed the closer I got to the Snake. In the narrowest places, the only trees around were in the bottom of the old river bed, and the tops were at road level or lower, with lots of hawks' nests in them. One hawk had been killed on the road, and another sat in a nearby tree watching the magpies clean up the road. He was still there an hour later on my way home. Sad. I didn't get lost this week! Yea! Here's what I'm currently working on in NoWriMo. All comments and suggestions welcome. It's beginning to drag, and I'm losing interest because I don't know how to tie up the loose ends. |
| Did you know there's a word for a disease you catch only after you've heard of it? Darn it all, I can't remember the word, and I can't blame it on alzheimers because I heard of that a long time ago. I know who to call to find out, but I have hair dye on my head at the moment and prefer not to use the phone. What made me think of it is the proponderance of ghost-sighting stories around these days. I love "Medium," and put up with the one Bill likes with the perky brunette who only sees dead people. The character from Medium seems to be seeing more already-dead people since the other show came up in the ratings. Coincidence? I was reading a AAA magazine the other day about a cruise down the Mississippi. The author of the article began to talk about a certain town they visited, and how she told (warned? bragged to?) the guide that she could see the fine old Southern ghosts. Somebody wrote into Dear Abby also claiming to see ghosts, or complaining about someone who did. (I use that name generically, because I don't remember which column it actually was.) (And obviously I don't remember the gist of the letter either.) Maybe I can blame this whole memory thing on the fumes of the hair dye. Whew! They are strong. Honestly though, I have to admit I'm unprepared to say what it is I wanted to say. Should have done my research first. *** On a different note, we had a good police presentation today at hospice about street drugs and scams. The officers brought a variety of crack and meth pipes, some that looked like handblown Venetian glass. What a waste of creativity! Some beautiful bongs too. I'm sure there were a couple of us who might have seen those in clients' homes and never knew what they were. So much for now, or I'll be tooooo red. |
| Most people would not associate a drippy nose with a pleasant day, but it was. I started sneezing in the car on the way to work, and was having a full blown rhino attack by the time I arrived. So, I sat through the meeting detailing the weekend on-call events and deaths, and excused myself and came home. Well, I stopped at the grocery first and the bank, because those were errands I had to get done. Then I had the day to write, do laundry and walk the dog. YEAAAAA! I made up for not writing on my story yesterday and finished ahead. Even wrote a flash piece for The Writer's Cramp, celebrating Alfred Hitchcock Day. Had a good dinner fixed for Bill when he got home. He's always in a hurry to eat, change into his uniform and get to CAP on Monday nights, although he's had to miss it for the past two weeks. (Which meant I didn't have a free night to write either, boo hoo. Poor me.) Unfortunately for him, he got called back down to work, which is 30-some miles away, because their generator wouldn't stay on. Too bad. He'd just gotten into his uniform too, and had to change again. Talking about the generator reminds me of a joke I read somewhere. A lady was having trouble with her computer and called for some help. She explained her problem to the man on the other end of the line, who was, unfortunately in a foreign country. She told him she couldn't get her laptop to work. Attempting to make sure he was understanding her, he paraphrased back to her: "I see. You are having difficulty transporting your laptop to your place of employment."  Did I tell you what I overheard the other day? One lady said she didn't shop much at WalMart any more. She preferred shopping at the Dollar Store, "because you don't have to dress up so much!" |
| A good Sunday altogether. It was very warm, 75 degrees. We might have flown to Portland after church to visit my son and his family, but we had a birthday party to go to. The weather for flying was a little iffy, so I didn't feel too bad about it. But then, after going home once because I'd forgotten to get the address-- don't you hate having to do that?--there were no cars parked near the house. It was supposed to be a drop by affair between 2 and 5. Dumb, me that is. I should have hunted for the invitation instead of just looking up the address in the phone book. Rather than just go home for it--a second time--I called a friend. Woops, the birthday is next week. So, we got a good nap, never a bad thing, and thoroughly enjoyed the bottle of Zerba's merlot we were taking as a gift. Great with steak strips and a Tivo'ed Saturday Night Live. Is that boring? Nah, it was pleasant. |
| We got two good things done today. We put strips of chicken wire in the eaves of the porch above the gutters where the starlings always nest. We sincerely hope they will take the hint and find another nursery this spring. Then, the weather being warm and good enough, we flew to Spokane to deliver a birthday present for Sophie. I ordered it in time last month, but it came from Canada and was delayed quite a while. I substituted something else at the time, something small, but this was the present she was waiting for. It was a Polly Pockets cruise ship. She emailed me to ask, hadn't her "ship come in" yet? Their school has been on a three-day field trip to Seattle, to the science center, the Maritime museum and the Museum of Flight. Bill is jealous.  Haven't much to say tonight, so I'll share this good quote I ran into at the website for Barnstorm magazine. I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks--who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. —Henry David Thoreau |
I put a bunch of stories in my NoWriMo file, stories that had no endings or needed better endings. Here's one I put in the folder that I think is a strong story. I'm not at all sure that it needs a different ending though. I'm not sure it needs anything else; but maybe it does need more. I wrote it for a contest with a word limit. Maybe it needs more-- inside the story, not necessarily at the end of it. I want your opinion. What do you think? Do you understand it? Could I improve it some way?
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| Duplicate Bridge players are the elite group. I've never played it myself, but I like the setup. It seems like a good framework for a lot of different interactions. In the bridge game, four hands are dealt and played as always. Then other foursomes come and play the identical hands, trying to make better scores. It's a little like having the beginning of a story as a prompt, and everyone gets a whack at completing it. Or, after your mother-in-law makes some idiotic statement, repeating it to your friends to see who comes up with the best retorts and ends the conversation in the best way. The snappiest comeback wouldn't win the contest, any more than a single finesse would win a hand of bridge. It would be in how you played the whole game. In relationships, the win-win situation would most often get the most points. Wouldn't that make a good story, something like Groundhog Day, only in this case it wouldn't be the same people living one day over and over. Only the situation would be the same. Maybe that wouldn't be very interesting after all, she said as she, along with people all over the planet, went to fix dinner. So, how are you fixing your chicken tonight? |
| Hi--I've still got time for a quick one. Ooh, that sounds a little suggestive. Well too bad, I only meant a blog. My kids got me a subscription to "The Writer" magazine for Christmas. I got an email today from there with their online forums, and they are very interesting. I've just read some great dialogue tips, and a lot about scams involving literary agents. There's discussion about some on-line writing classes that's good to find, because they definitely are not all created equal. Here's the URLs: http://cs.writermag.com/forums/68/ShowForum.aspx http://www.writermag.com/wrt/default.aspx?c=a&id=3451 *** Saw a rufus sided towhee in my yard today, just the male. He's been around before, but I just got out the bird book and looked him up. Haven't seen the female yet. Got as much written on my first WriMo story as I could. I'm calling it ended, although I'll be doing a lot of rewriting. I did get to a place them seemed like the end. Now, which one shall I tackle next? Maybe my old Kitchen Conversations. It's a favorite of mine, and several people have said it needed more plot and a real ending. I'm glad to still be blogging today. I know I'd miss it. |
| It's hard to get time to write, and my stats are so low here that I think I may as well stop for a while. Not for good though. I enjoy and value blogging, and appreciate the responses I get from dragonfly and an occasional few others. Bill just cannot give me a quiet moment to do this, even when "we" are watching some TV show he likes. He has to keep talking to me all the time, and I can't think to write. The time I might otherwise grab to blog is now taken up by my commitment to NoWriMo, and trying to finish my short stories and learn more about writing them is a worthy cause to me. I'm at a place where it doesn't come easy any more. Short things from a prompt flowed easily, even if they didn't necessarily win contests. Given the amount of time I spent on them usually, writing them made me feel witty and clever. Now I'm plodding, and the writing has no flair, just trying to get to a point, an ending. It's sort of against my nature. I generally prefer the journey to the product, the middle to the end, the imaginative words to the plot. So, even though I'm still blue for the month, I'm not going to try so hard to keep it going. I have some good ideas for blogs in the future, but don't have the time for them now. I have a whole stack of old New Yorker magazines, all of last year's and some older ones. When I'm done with my NoWriMo commitment, or at least the month of March, whichever comes first-- I intend to go through all of them. I'll make a spreadsheet of the poetry and note which poems have meter, rhyme, what the subject matter is, etc. . I'm interested to see how that turns out. Then I might do the same with their fiction: look to see how long the stories are, the situations, ethnicity, number of characters, style, point of view, type of ending. I think that will be an interesting subject. And I hope to write some more Wren and Rupert stories this month. So, I have plans for this blog, so please come back sometime. |
| 4253 today! Well, that's altogether, not just today; but that's not bad, especially since I missed yesterday entirely! I'm beginning to wonder if the story will ever end. I'll probably have to edit half of it out. But before that happens, I've got to find a way to make it more interesting. Hmmm. But adding a new element would make it last even longer. But, but, but, but.... Did I tell you I saw five great blue herons the other day as I wound around the wheatfields lost? The first one took off right next to my car and startled me. The house at the end of my road has a dozen baby lambs. So cute. I love to drive in the spring. We got leaf-icons in the fall, and snowflakes in the winter. No blossoms, or baby birds? |
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