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| Good news, everybody! My sauerkraut making jars have arrived! (I got irritated at the price they're asking for like a cup and a half of real sauerkraut at the store. Come on, people. It's cabbage and salt.) |
| Out my window I can hear birds, and in the distance, sirens, and in the distance from THAT, I can hear a pack of coyotes yipping back at the sirens. Texas is a strange place... |
| Good morning! Did you do your morning pages? I am back from the 90s and I gotta say, most of what I missed was grocery delivery apps and you guys. My morning pages were about that, and just sort of rambling. I did, in the course of yesterday, have some good thoughts about future (and past) chapters. Today I need to respond to reviews, I need to DO some reviews (I am woefully behind), and I need to prep for a music gig I have tonight. (Nothing exciting, just keyboard at a very small event. But one should still prep...) |
| Good morning, from 1998! (See my previous notebook post, my kids are Living The Era. We may even eat Hot Pockets...) Did you do your morning pages? Because I am, 90s fashion, sharing a desktop PC with my whole family, I expect I shall be a bit thin on the ground on WdC today, but I still did my morning pages. And I will say, it was refreshing as heck to wake up and not look at online news first thing. I recommend it. There's other lovely things about this faux-90s day that I may just...kinda... take into the whole rest of the summer. We shall see. |
| My kids have decided they want to have a "90s Day" with me tomorrow, to see what life was like Back When. You know, listening to CDs and the radio, and watching television all together on the big TV one episode at a time, and leaving our smartphones in the kitchen as if they were landlines? Playing board games? Like old timey pioneers did in covered wagons? (My daughter asked if girls were allowed to wear pants in the 90s? Yes, I feel about 732 years old). Anyway, this means I will be sharing a desktop with my entire household tomorrow, which means you may see slightly less of me. Never fear, I will still check in about morning pages, and I will be writing....just, possibly, on a typewriter for transposition later. ("In MY day," I said, unwarily, "there was ONE desktop computer for everyone and we ALL HAD TO SHARE and the Internet tied up the phone!") |
Raven  - hey, my mom had a Windows 98 in the late aughts... We used to play Chinese Checkers between pages loading! |
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In my day in the 90's we had a t-bone style table down in the rec room, and each child had their own computer. Were we made of money? No, we were not. But the youngest managed to crash my computer on a weekly basis. That was enough for me, so I got two second-hand computers and gave one to each. They were no longer allowed to use my computer. |
| Good morning! Did you do your morning pages? Mine this morning were a hodgepodge, but I was reminded again as I wrote of how things that you know are bad for you can sort of spread to fill the space available (like a gas) and things that you do want, that are good for you, take a lot less time than you think they will. I am being a bit vague there, but I bet you can think of stuff in each category. I've got a busy week ahead, but that doesn't mean I can't put stuff I want to do in there (writing, reviewing, reading, music, exercise) alongside the stuff I don't want to do (more kid appointments, a volunteer opportunity that is good but scary, etc.). Every Monday is a fresh start. Here we go. |
| We've got one week left on our read-through of The Artist's Way and I am thinking I will leave the forum up and choose another craft book to work through together. Have you been interested in our group but kinda didn't like the book? Maybe you'd like a choice in picking the next one? Neat! Here's some options, go ahead and vote: 1. Zen In The Art Of Writing by Ray Bradbury 2. Never Say You Can't Survive: Writing Through Hard Times by Charlie Jane Anders 3. Eloquence by Mark Forsyth 4. Sailing the Sea of Craft by Ursula LeGuin 5. Dryer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide To Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dryer If you do not vote, I will just pick the next one, maybe by rolling dice. |
| Over at the forum we are talking about "Week 11, Recovering A Sense of Autonomy" , wherein Julia says you should maybe quit your job to become a stained glass artist/unicycler/interpretive dance painter, and where I say you should maybe get a boring job that has health insurance and predictable hours and do stained glass, unicycling, and intepretive dance painting in your off hours (say, instead of scrolling news sites and/or The Doom). We also talk about swimming. Swing by "Do The Artist's Way With Raven" and argue with me, or agree with me, as you wish. We've only got one week left of this book, but it's never too late to start. |
| I have FINALLY written another chapter of Haunted Space Station. (s it any good? I have no idea! I am trying not to think about it! We are just pressing on with the draft, here! I can't let my brain keep holding onto this chapter, I have to shoo it down the road like a spooky horse! (What Haunted Space Station, Raven? Well, this one: "Minerva Dreaming" If you want to read it, drop me a line. I'll get you the passkey.) Sometimes I get so annoyed with my own brain, you guys. |
| Good morning! Did you do your morning pages? I have a meeting this morning, so my morning pages are likely to be afternoon pages. Lately mine have been about history, and the garden, and a bunch of stuff that isn't writing. But, of course, it is all potential grist to the mill. What grist have you got today? |
| Good morning! Did you do your morning pages? Some of my real life penpals wrote back to me and I got their letters yesterday, which was wonderful. It's going to be a beautiful day. I am going to walk, and write, and teach school, and mail my reply letters, and work to fix this one little corner of the world. I'm going to plant a third raised bed in a tote (friends! It works!!). I'm going to make a closet functional. AND NOBODY CAN STOP ME. (That is a rough summary of my pages today. How are yours?) |
| I was told by a reviewer here on WdC, that I was misusing ellipses when I should have been using em-dashes. The question for me is, how do I indicate pauses, or changes of direction in dialog without them? |
🐰 Richard 🐤  - so, grammatically speaking, ellipses outside dialog indicate you've skipped over some words, for instance if I only want to quote the relevant portion of a history paragraph. Inside dialog, they (in US English) typically indicate the speaker is trailing off. An em dash has, likewise, traditionally indicated (inside dialog) a sharp pause or that the speaker is interrupted. Outside dialog, em dashes often work like parentheses. But dialog is tricky because you usually can't transcribe exactly what people do in real life dialog and have it read as anything but a slog. (People say "um" and "ah" and other stuff way too much.) So what we do when we write dialog is make a kind of facsimile of real life speech. My best tip is to read your dialog aloud, with the pauses and trail-offs, and see how it sounds. Or better still, have the computer voice on MS Word read it to you. Ultimately, though, your writing style is your own. You should read various grammar resources (I like Benjamin Dweyer, the Chicago Style Manual is also good) and decide for yourself which rules make sense for the art YOU want to make. |
| Tonight I was sitting on the back porch with The Husband, talking about life, the universe, and everything (I recommend it, if you have a porch and someone to sit with), and I watched two hummingbirds fly into the neighbor's myrtle tree and yell at each other before having a slap fight. You'd think, looking at hummingbirds, that they'd be dainty little fairy birds, wouldn't you? NOPE. These two guys were *growling* and going at each other like a couple of tiny dockworkers down the pub on payday. (Did you know hummingbirds scream/growled? Me either.) That's all from the back porch tonight; more updates as events warrant. |
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Have you ever watched the movie, Labyrinth, with David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly? The opening scene shows a meaner side of faeries. Hummingbirds are amazingly cool little birds! A 'real world' friend of ours had multiple feeders and virtual clouds of hummingbirds in her yard. We'd sit on her porch for hours, chatting and watching the hummingbirds! Bren had a co-worker at one of the fast-food restaurants where she worked who never seemed to stay still. When there were no customers at the counter, she would flit around the place checking and emptying waste cans, refilling condiment stations, cleaning tables, and just always moving about and doing things. You can probably see where this goes. I nicknamed her 'Hummingbird.' She's the only fast-food worker I've ever met with a work ethic as strong as Bren's. |
Always Humble Poet PNG- 📓  - thank you for sharing this. It was a very enjoyable read. Perfect to wake up to this morning. You've set me on a lovely path for the day. |
| Always Humble Poet PNG- 📓 - oh, Labyrinth is one of my foundational texts, yes. That junk on Sarah's back is an image that makes me give things away. (Somebody else might use and love this doll/lipstick/thing I've outgrown, but for me, for now, "it's all just JUNK" and I have a quest to complete!) And I've looked real problems in the eye before and said "you have no power over me." They really don't, you know. Die Gedanken sind frei, and so on. |
| Good morning! Did you do your morning pages? The birds are all back here--I thought they never left, but apparently those were just the determined birds, and all the seasonal residents are now back and yelling in my yard. I love it. Mostly. (They are VERY loud.) I am figuring stuff out with this Chapter What Won't Get Written, I think. I'm 2k words into it, so you'd think it would be simple to get the last 3k going, but I need to figure out which plot points I'm going to reveal when. So! I think I will go to my meeting this morning, endeavor to not think about chapters during that, and then come home and sit with a notebook and actually plot the rest of this chapter like a grownup (ugh), then spend the afternoon like I said I would and help an anonymous child "fix their closet mess" (double UGH but I want that closet functioning). Sometimes we all need someone to help us fix our closet mess, you know? |
| Good morning! Did you do your morning pages? I woke up tired for some reason, which is always annoying, but we keep moving forward. I have deployed a cup of the Fancy Coffee, and I have read A Poem. (I am fighting with Walt Whitman. I begin to think I do not do well with transcendentalists on account of finding Bronson Alcott insufferable at a young age, reading about Louisa.) I have done my morning pages which were not elegant at all. If the sun will just situate itself in the sky I will go for a walk, and then maybe get something cool done today. Maybe even writing? Maybe. The words keep kind of sitting there, taunting me, which probably means I need a "just plow blindly forward" session to break the impasse. We shall see. What do you like to do to break impasses? Or do you just let the impasse handle itself naturally? |
un: 
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(You can also make dill pickles, dilly beans, those pickled carrots that go on bi bim bap, etc. It's all pretty much just salt and time.)