Category Archives: writing

Workshops

Posted on August 22, 2008 | Leave a comment

Going to take a bit of time, (I’ve been talking to the English guy in the newsroom too much, I think. Ian’s rubbing off on me.) before I have to run to pick the son up at the airport (from England–hmm) and do that blog about RWA workshops I went to, while I have it. Time, I mean.

Okay. The first workshop in my little notebook (a non-spiral composition book in a smaller size I bought just for conference, and have decided I really like), is MEDICAL FACTS AND FALLACIES. This was presented by an actual doctor, who said that movies are really bad places to get information about how doctors and hospitals and emergency rooms and the like actually work. For instance, in one movie, a man was trying to look up poison someone had been given by thumbing through the Physician’s Desk Reference to match pills. A doctor would actually look in one of the books called a “toxidrome” which lists poisons by their symptoms. She gave lots of juicy little details. Like, bullet wounds don’t get infected like knife wounds, (the bullet’s speed of travel makes it too hot for germs to stick, or something like that) so they don’t dig them out, unless the location is dangerous. She recommended a book GREATEST BENEFIT TO MANKIND (according to my notes), and said that writers could fudge the facts for the benefit of the premise of the story–as long as you don’t fudge too much. This was a great workshop, and if you can get it on tape, do so.

I went to HOW TO REVIVE A DYING PROJECT OR A DYING CAREER. This was more of a motivational workshop than a crafty “how-to.” Yes, it was How To, but it was How to deal with fears and perfectionism and the stuff that gets in the way of getting the writing done. It was pretty good too, and in it she recommended the books by Ralph Keys, COURAGE TO WRITE and THE WRITER’S BOOK OF HOPE.

I also went to Theresa Meyers’ DOWN AND DIRTY MEDIA TRAINING which had a lot of great ways to handle interviews and how to get interviews. Like, in order to get a media interview, you need a hook to connect yourself to the audience, so first you can identify a problem the audience might have, and then shoot it down. “The economy is bad and people are depressed. But Romance makes people feel good, and it’s cheap.” Had some really good stuff in this one too. I’ve been impressed by Meyers on line. Now I was impressed by her in person.

I went to the PLOTTING WHEEL workshop, but the original person who was supposed to give this workshop couldn’t be there, and the sub wasn’t very good.

The workshop on how to make the Regency Historical connect to today’s readers was a good one. It gave me some good ideas for my own works–like creating a place on my website where my readers can experience my fantasy world. The early 1800s is far enough away that it’s like a foreign universe, so that’s what these speakers did.

I went to a Writing the Selling Synopsis workshop. I always need a good way to write a synopsis. I’m not sure I use any of the stuff that I’ve workshopped on, but maybe it’s soaking in. Anyway, this workshop gave one way to organize things and did a good job of it. And since I sort of use this method, maybe it helped and will help me refine what I do.

I think I went to a couple of other workshops, but they weren’t the kind where you take notes. I went to the theft of intellectual property/plagiarism workshop and got a lot out of it, and I went to a “What RWA can do for you” workshop that I liked a lot. And as I said earlier, I went to the Tor spotlight and saw my cover.

Okay, time to go. Though the boy’s (and girls’) plane is about 2 hours late, this will give me time to go by the bank, and mail the son-in-law’s birthday present.

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Posted in family, workshops, writing

How is Reality TV like Genre Fiction?

Posted on June 26, 2008 | 3 Comments

I was scanning the blogs I have come to read semi-regularly, and one of them had a post about Reality Television.

Now, I don’t watch much reality TV. I don’t like the Survivor-type shows, or the Bachelor shows, or the ones where they try to screw up peoples’ lives. I have to admit that I am even enough of a prehistoric antediluvian (if those words don’t mean the same thing), that I don’t watch American Idol.

I do however like a good many of the “fix-up-your house/yard” shows, and will watch Dancing with the Stars with the fella. (He also likes Iron Chef–which I have to admit is sometimes fun.) Still, I’m just not a big reality TV fan. So when I read this post about how writers like Reality TV, I thought “pfffftthh–yeah, right.” I do see how other writers might like it, but frankly, I think Reality TV is far less real than the scripted stuff, because People just Don’t let out their real gut-deep stuff. We hang onto our secrets.

Anyway, one thing said hit me.

The plot takes the viewers on a journey, from the opening credits of the first episode to the closing credits of the finale. The number of episodes and even types of challenges might remain the same from season to season but, couple it with the characters, and the story becomes something a bit different each time.

And suddenly, I had a rebuttal for those who complain about how genre fiction always has such a predictable ending. (Although, it’s usually only romance that gets those kinds of complaints, sometimes one gets them for other sorts of genres.) Reading a romance or a mystery novel is about the Journey and the Characters, not the ending.

Admittedly, the folks who sneer at romance and other commercial fiction also usually sneer at Reality TV–but regular, scripted television shows are the same. Except in that case, you even have the same characters facing the same kinds of challenges. Characters discover a crime. Characters solve a crime. The end. Then again, those folks sneer at pretty much all television. I tell ya, it’s almost like you’re flat not supposed to enjoy anything at all.

These are the same people who get all shocked when you talk about reading something Just For Fun. Who think you must read Edifying Fiction (or strictly non-fiction).

Well, phooey on that. By the time you get out of school (and some of you are taking longer about that than others), life’s too short to spend time reading a book (or watching television) unless you Enjoy it. Don’t think you “ought” to read this or that. If you like it, then read it. If you don’t, then don’t–and don’t apologize to anybody for it.

No wonder there are so few readers left–when so many in the world are sucking all the FUN out of reading!

Okay, I will get off my soapbox now. I’m just frustrated today, I guess, by all the people who seem determined to suck the fun out of–reading, if not life…

No writing this week. I did get all my revisions in the computer for the Old Spirits partial. I printed out the first couple of chapters of New Blood to read at ApolloCon. Never did put that on my website, did I? Sorry.

I’m hoping I won’t have to go look after the parents before Sunday afternoon–Mom had surgery that was more extensive than we expected (still relatively minor), so… I’m pretty sure I’ll have to go up sometime, though, because I’m not sure just how competent Daddy is with the looking-after.

OH. And the boy wrecked his car. Nobody hurt. Something of a slow-mo crash–low speeds. The other person got a ticket, but his car isn’t drivable, and this is the third time it’s had front-end damage. (I don’t think we’re counting the tree that fell on it…) We may have to get a new car. But for right now, we’re dealing with being a 2 car family with 3 drivers. He dropped me off today, and will pick me up, but I’m leaving the island tomorrow, so he and his father will have to deal with car issues then.

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Posted in family, New Blood, Old Spirits, rant, writing

Rain! and Hecticness

Posted on June 24, 2008 | 1 Comment

It’s been a very dry spring on my island. We just barely missed making the Top 5 Dryest Springs Ever because we had a little stormlet two days before the official first day of summer. Then on the first day of summer, while I was driving back to town from Fort Worth, The Sky Didst Open and The Deluge Didst Pour Forth.

While I was on the highway. And I had to visit the little girls’ room (so to speak). I’d’ve made it all the way home, except everybody slowed way down–because when the Sky Opens here, the Deluge Really Does Pour Forth, and the freeways tend to flood three or four inches deep. And when they flood, people hydroplane and crash into the other cars if they drive too fast. So it’s a good thing that people slow down. But I had to get off the freeway and find a pit stop. Then I had to squeeze my way back amongst the cars driving slowly in the pouring rain, because it didn’t show any signs of slowing. And it didn’t. Rained all the way home. Rained me into the house. Stopped long enough for the fella to bring my stuff in the house without raining on everything. Then it started raining again.

Rained again today. Hard, but not terribly long–though it’s still sorta sprinklish. We have friends in town, from our little Panhandle town, come to the beach. It will be fun to get to see them again, but there’s a lot of cleaning up that has to be done. And grocery shopping. I did already get by the fish market… You know we have to serve boiled fresh shrimp to all our visitors.

This is going to be a VERY hectic week. Besides our visitors, our “bureau” at the paper is short one person, because she got slapped in the hospital before she keeled over, and they need me to put in extra hours, if I can, but there’s a funeral I ought to go to (relative of a relative), and I’m taking Friday to head over to ApolloCon. There’s a couple of other things too, that I may skip out on–or maybe not. Depends on how everything else goes. But I’m tired.

And I’m trying to pull together a partial of Old Spirits to send the editor. I think my chapters look pretty good. But I need to write a synopsis that makes sense. That’s not going to happen this week. Not as crazy as life has gotten just now, but I’m thinking about it. Trying to figure out how to summarize stuff I’ve written, and sort of exactly what will happen in the parts I haven’t written. I think I need to pull a big chunk of courtroom stuff out… of all the courtroom stuff, maybe. It’s very loosey-goosey just now, and I know I’ll need to tighten the heck out of it before it’s done. But for now, I guess I’ll go with it.

Going to read from New Blood at ApolloCon at my reading Friday night. Hope a few people will be there early enough to want to hear it. Have to print it out to be ready to read.

Here I have written this huge long blog post, and I haven’t even mentioned the cool beach stuff. Like, beginning last Friday, when I went out to walk on the beach (sans Dolly), and the fish were WAY in shore. And of course, the pelicans and dolphins (and I even saw a skimmer, which was way cool) were inshore chowing down on them. I love to watch the brown pelicans fishing, because they’re so cool about it. When the fish are thick, the pelicans will fly just ten or 12 feet above the water, and when they see a fish, the feet will drop like webbed landing gear, and BAM! They’ll hit the water. They dive so fast, and there’s always a splash–a big one, given the size of the birds. But it doesn’t faze them–up they pop, maybe float a minute, and off they go, into another take-off to get ready for another dive. They can dive from as high as 50 feet without getting hurt, but given how murky the water often is, I wonder how they can see fish in it. Maybe that’s why they fly lower. But then, I have seen them dive from way high up, so they must be able to spot them. It’s so much fun to watch that drop–Bam! (er, splash?)

Today, I took Dolly back out again. She’s really pretty good, but I think I’m letting her get into some bad habits. I think she figured out how to jump around in the surf while on the leash–she can run in circles and still run and jump. I think she watches for the bigger waves (still not very big, but she’s short) so she can jump them and let them float her a second or two. There were all kinds of dead fish on the shore–some of them really big. I saw one that was a good 2 feet by 1 foot from dorsal to ventral. Big fish. I don’t know if they just got stuck in the shallow water, or what, but… Lots of great big feathers from the pelicans too. Dolly couldn’t figure out how to pick one of those up to carry it with her. There were big washes of broken shells that were still big enough to hurt my tootsies. And more sargasso, but not enough to make blankets. After the sargasso cometh the jellyfishes… Come on, seaweed! Keep coming. Don’t want jellyfishes.

Since Catie has encouraged me to walk to Rivendell, I’m going to do it. I don’t remember how far it is, but I’ve walked 6 miles on the way. According to the Eowyn Challenge, I have made it into Tookland. It’s going to take me a Really Long Time to do this. At least the only thing I have to climb are the rock jetties, every half mile or so…

Words written–who knows? (I’ve typed in 92 pages–but I’ve written lots more than that)–I did write 20 pages last week.

Miles walked to Rivendell: 6

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Posted in life, New Blood, Old Spirits, the beach, work, writing

When I don’t WRITE FIRST

Posted on June 13, 2008 | 3 Comments

This is the granddog. Dolly wanted me to throw her bone for her when I took her picture. She’s not jealous of her toys at all, though she does like to play tug-of-war. She was just home for the weekend when I took the pic. She’s spending the summer with us now, and has filled out a little more. She’s just now getting to be a year old. I’ve enjoyed having a dog to play with and take out to walk.

We went walking this morning and she worked me hard–didn’t pull or anything. She was very good on the leash. But she likes to walk fast, and I hate to hold her back, so I walked a little faster. Which is good for me, so I probably ought to take her out more often, huh?

I was fussing at her, trying to get her to hold still in this other picture, and she dropped her bone and put on that “I’m in trouble?” look… No, I didn’t crop or compress the pictures. Should have, but I didn’t. I was mad at the computer, because it wasn’t downloading the pictures the way I wanted it to. I did finally get them downloaded–after only a little cussing…

I’ve been wanting to share pictures of the granddoggy–and to put some pictures on the blog just because they look nice, but, well… Mostly I blog at the dayjob these days, and I don’t have my pictures there. I e-mailed these to myself. I’ll have to do that more often. :)

Don’t know what I have to blog about. Went walking today. The beach was lovely. Not so much seaweed today.

I did get six good pages written yesterday…and today, I wrote a paragraph. I think it had more than one sentence in it.

See, I’ve listened twice now to a workshop on Writer’s Bootcamp, which discusses lowering goals to raise production. If your goal is one sentence, and you write two, you’ve achieved 200 per cent of your goal. (Right, math person?) Anyway, I’d like to write more than one paragraph, but –and I do know exactly what I did wrong.

I did not Write First.

I’ve learned over the years, especially when I got to write full time, that if I am going to get any writing done, I have to Write First. Before I look at the computer, package up books to mail, print out critiques for writing chapter meetings–any of it–I have to write.

Now, it is permissible to shower and have breakfast, and even to go out for a walk with Dolly (or without) (in which case, the walk comes between breakfast and shower, ’cause, you know, one must wash off the sand and salt and sweat–this IS Texas. The temp may only be 87, but there’s, like, 900% humidity which makes it feel like it’s 418 degrees…) before I start writing. I can also put dishes in the dishwasher, or put laundry on to wash (preferably not both), or make necessary phone calls before I start to wash. (The phone calls really need to come before the writing, because otherwise the phone calls get forgotten and my meds don’t get renewed, or my hair gets longer and longer and longer–which state it is in right now. Way Too Long and Shaggy.) But those are the only permitted chores. Otherwise, the writing HAS to come first.

And today, I didn’t. I needed to send an important e-mail, and I needed to see if another e-mail had come in. (I hadn’t checked e-mail since Monday, so there were a lot, and I didn’t read very many of them.) I needed to download pictures from the camera. I needed to print some stuff out, except I couldn’t remember where I’d put the files. Then I got out the pages I wrote yesterday. Then there were the books I finished that ought to go on Shelfari (I know. Time-wasters…) Then I looked at what I wrote yesterday.

I added a phrase here, moved parts of a sentence around there to give it the highest impact. I clarified that bit and took this other thing completely out. Then I had to put a sentence in another spot. I tinkered. And when it was time to go on, I wrote my two sentences. (I’m pretty sure there were two.) And came to a stuttering halt.

I HATE this. I want to be able to sit down and just write. And I’m fumbling all over the place. Summer usually sucks when it comes to the writing. There’s a lot of stuff going on. I’m traveling a lot, have commitments in the evenings, more people at the house. But those are just excuses. Because if I remember to Write First, I can get it done. Sometimes it comes slow, but it does come. I just have to Write. First.

sigh.

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Posted in family, the beach, writing

Graduations, sisters and seaweed

Posted on June 10, 2008 | 1 Comment

So, we went to the niece’s graduation last Friday. I took the day off work so we could arrive early enough to help out with the shishkebab party, and got to cut up potatoes, peppers, melons and strawberries to go on skewers. The potatoes and peppers were cooked (with some pretty cool marinated meat). The fruit (which included both green and orange melon and pineapple) was not. (Though I did put some pineapple on to cook, actually.) I got to visit with the sister AND the brother and various in-laws. The nephews condescended to at least say hello, though not much else. They’re mostly at that monosyllabic teenaged or pre-teen phase. The nieces did chat more. (There are only two of them, and one is only 8. But her almost 18-year-old sister did visit quite a bit.) It was fun to get to see everybody. This leaves only 5 more kids on my side of the family still in public school. These kids are growing up.

My sister has graduated from college with her teaching degree–just three or four weeks before her daughter finished high school–and has a line on a job in the school where they live. We’ve all got our fingers crossed.

We came on back home Saturday, because we’ve got a lot going on this week. And now I try to think what it is, I can’t. Lots of church stuff going on. We’ve been experiencing house shopping with the daughter–they have now made an offer, and it was accepted, so they’ll be moving soon if all goes as it should. Hopefully I won’t have to go help them move. I’ve moved too much already this year.

I’ve been trying to get back in synch with the writing. It’s going a tiny bit better. I got 3 pages written today, rather than the 2 pages I wrote yesterday. Maybe I can write 4 pages tomorrow.

I went walking on the beach Monday and took the granddog. I’d been nervous about taking her with me, not knowing how she would behave, but I broke down Monday morning and just did it. Dolly did jump over the seat to sit in the back seat, rather than the back cargo area, but didn’t move any farther than that in the car. And when we got to the beach, she was a perfectly behaved little doggy. She didn’t even chase the birds, much less try to play with the few kids out that early. We didn’t walk in the water much. The seaweed has come in.

Oh BOY has the seaweed come in. It made an ankle-deep blanket about 3 or 4 feet deep right at the water’s edge, because there was so much of it, the water couldn’t push it any higher on the sand. It kind of dammed the water up, and if we wanted to walk on the water side of the sargasso, we were almost knee deep in the water when the waves came in. And it was this thick along the whole mile course that we walked, and all the miles we drove past.

Dolly’s a medium-sized doggy, so she walked a little faster than I do, which got me walking a little faster. Not as much faster as to keep up with Dolly, but faster. I’m a tad sore today.

So, that’s the news–pitiful, isn’t it? But I’m going to leave things at that.

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Posted in family, the beach, trips, writing

Blown Away

Posted on June 5, 2008 | Leave a comment

The wind has been blowing like crazy the past few days–knocking over the glider-swing in the back yard every night (as well as the big trashcan) and scaring the granddog into barking. There’s sand blowing across most of the streets in town and piling up in intersections or along curbs or the risers of the stairs up the seawall.

My hair, which needed cutting about 6 weeks ago, is at that awful length where, when the wind gets hold of it, it makes this Dutch-Girl-Paint-girl-hat curl over my ears and nothing I do can make it not stick out in that stupid Bozo-the-Clown curl. The wind is very damp, and has salt in it, and that combines with the hairspray (if I didn’t glue my hair down, it would hang straight down in my face and make me CRAZY) and makes the hair even more impossible. I really need a haircut. Bad. And can’t seem to remember to call anywhere or squeeze out time to go to a walk-in place. I’m either going to have to get used to looking like Bozo every time I set foot out in this wild wind, or manage to get this mess cut off.

I went out to walk this a.m. Right At High Tide. Usually I’m an hour ahead of the tide turning, or an hour behind, or sometimes smack in the middle. But today, I was on the beach for the only turning of the tide today, as high tide hit and then started back out. Not that I really noticed the turn of it, but I certainly did notice that it was high, especially since this wild wind–enough to make cars rock–is blowing straight onshore and pushing the water in more. I had to go almost to 39th street to find stairs that led to sand rather than water, and even then the water was almost knee deep a time or two. And since the tide was so high, the water was over sand that spends most of its time out of the water. Only the very top layer was wet. Immediately underneath, the sand was soft and squooshy, so I was sinking into the sand rather than pounding along the hard surface you usually get with wet sand, because it wasn’t wet enough. All that sinking in makes for quite a workout.

The wind is so strong, the birds were flying at an angle. I saw a few pelicans flying southwest, but pointed south (the direction the wind was coming from). Kind of like you have to drive your car in a strong wind, with the steering wheel pointed into the wind to keep the wind from shoving you off the road. The gulls were flying like crazy just to stand still. It’s been this way for days.

I’m waxing so poetical (or maybe obsessively) because there’s not much else to report. The fella and I did go out to see PRINCE CASPIAN last night, finally. The boy had to work, or we might have gone to see Indiana Jones. That’s the one he wants to see. I forgot to take my sweater, but didn’t get too cold. The folks behind us in line had obviously been to the local theater before, because one had a huge fleece robe, and another had a big jacket. Man, they keep that place cold.

The writing, it also sucketh. No real excuse for it, except that I keep finding excuses. People visiting. Errands needing running. Granddogs needing to be played with. Nieces and nephews graduating. The nephew’s done. The niece is tomorrow. Have to/want to go. Get to leave early enough to go eat shishkebab at the sister’s.

I think I’ve written a grand total of 5 pages this week. That’s five more pages than I had last week, but they’re all…transition. Getting from the morgue to the murder scene kind of stuff. Bleah. I mean, we have to get from one place to the other, but it shouldn’t have to take 5 pages to do it. Of course, I’m disposing of an excess character (indisposition, not death) and switching POV in the process, but it doesn’t feel like anything’s happened. Suppose that’s because it hasn’t. And I’m still not sure where the villain will show up and cause trouble. I’d really like a bit of a frothing-at-the-mouth scene. Especially since I have two potential frothers. Maybe I can use the alternate frother here… Hmm.

Anyway–there’s the News Of The Week So Far. Enjoy, and watch out for that wind. :)

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Posted in family, movies I watched, pastimes, the beach, writing

Sandcastles and such

Posted on June 3, 2008 | Leave a comment

We had houseguests this weekend. The in-laws finally made it down to the island and we had a great time. I keep telling people we love having people come and visit and we want all the brothers and sisters and cousins and nieces and nephews to come–and nobody believes me. But we do. We don’t have a lot of time available for them to come–but we do want them to do it.

Anyway, the fella’s folks got in Thursday afternoon–the day the boy started his first shift at work. He’s waiting tables at one of the nice restaurants on the seawall–it was that or construction work, and he was in favor of the place with air conditioning. He was still at home when they arrived, so it worked out well. Friday, I went in to work in the a.m. while the others got a tour of town and hit the fish market, so we had a shrimp boil for supper.

Our family–both sides–is all about shrimp. Even those store-bought, previously frozen limp-shrimp rings will be inhaled in ten minutes flat (depending on how many cousins are inhaling). And if one of the little cousins proclaims a dislike for shrimp, the standard answer is “Good! More for us.” (One of my grandboys doesn’t like shrimp. His little brother has loved them since he started eating real food. But then he’s like “Mikey.” He will eat anything he can chew. The daughter’s boy has recently decided he will eat shrimps too. Alas, fewer for us. And time spent peeling them for the little guys that can’t be spent peeling our own.)

But, much as we enjoy those grocery-store variety, they pale–absolutely fade away–in comparison to shrimp fresh off the boat, bought at the fish market the same morning they are boiled, chilled and eaten. It’s been a while since we hit the market, and it reminded me that we need to do it more often. (Especially since the fella de-headed the shrimps that came with their heads on and I didn’t have to do it. I hate getting stabbed by shrimp spines.) We don’t need a special occasion. Just shrimp. Oh MY, those babies were yummy.

Mostly, that’s what we did for the weekend. We ate. We also rode the ferry over to Bolivar Peninsula and back, and went out to look at the sandcastles. There’s an annual sandcastle building contest sponsored by an architectural association with all sorts of categories, plus “Best of Show.” The castle that won first place was a literal castle. With ARCHES.

I have no idea how they built those arches. I don’t think they can use any building material other than sand and water, so the arches totally impressed me–and the judges too, obviously. (I’ll get a picture from the fella as soon as I can.)

We also went to dine at the boy’s workplace and I got to try the famous pecan pie. It was almost more a pecan cake, because the filling had flour in it, but it was yummy. I ate way too much, but I’m not sorry. Except that it will take several more power walks (if my walking had any power) to work it off. Sigh.

I got no writing done last Friday. None yesterday, and today I eked out a whole two pages. But it’s better than nothing I guess. (sigh)

So what cool thing did y’all do over the weekend? Or what yummy thing did you get to eat? (I do talk about food a lot here, don’t I? What does this tell you about me???)(I know.)

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Posted in food, pastimes, writing

Summer Crazy Season

Posted on May 28, 2008 | 2 Comments

Yes, it has started. The Summer Crazy Season. It begins with graduations, so for us, it started this past Saturday when we went to watch one of the nephews graduate. That meant a trip to Fort Worth, then sitting outdoors (fortunately, the ceremony was in the morning before it got Really Hot and under a tent, so there was less threat of sunburn) for a couple of hours, then off to a family party and much eating of barbecue and shrimps and cake. This is not particularly crazy, but it did involve driving long distances and sitting outside in the heat (they had little cardboard fans on sticks with a photo of the graduating class to stir the air) and lots of very loud children. We have pictures of the grandboys to post–but I don’t think they’re uploaded yet.

But no, the craziness does not end there, because the very next day, we had to go load up the boy–who is not so boyish any more–and move his stuff to storage, then move the rest of his stuff, and the granddog, home for the summer. This meant lots of climbing up and down stairs and vacuuming and re-packing of overstuffed boxes. (He didn’t inherit the packing gene which his father and sister have…That’s my boy…) And then driving again.

We had a party/potluck barbecue Monday night I made a bushel of potato salad for. (Other families don’t eat potato salad like mine does. Five pounds of potatoes is only the beginning–and if the other folks at the pot luck don’t eat much, all the better. They can have it for breakfast.) (Yes. Breakfast.) Also made the flour-free peanutbutter cookies, AKA the easiest cookies ever.

Much of the rest of the time has been spent trying to get the boy’s internet up and running. I have internet. We’re just trying to branch it off the main modem for him. The router we used in the Panhandle is refusing to work. You can only buy wireless routers now–though the one we got does have wire hookups for four computers, plus the wireless thing. But it’s extremely slow when it does work. So I think he’s taking it back and picking up another one. (Things are beginning to feel expensive.)

I did use the trip to the mainland to pick up the router as an excuse to stop off at the mall Waldenbooks and snabble up a copy of Blood Noir. I read it too. I’ll wait a day or two before I go through it again and make sure I caught everything. I also bought a bunch of new romances because, hey–Waldenbooks has a “buy 4 get 5th free” thing, and I’d already picked up 3 of them. So I got 5 in all. The new Quinn, the new Layton, the new Chase, an Elizabeth Bevarly and … one other I can’t remember right now.

Let’s see–this coming weekend, we have company coming. Tomorrow. The next weekend, a niece is graduating and we’re going up for that. Then there’s stuff during the week. Oh, and it’s time to get ready for hurricane season on top of everything else. We live on a Gulf coast barrier island, so this is not something to ignore. So we have to put together a couple of hurricane kits–one for evacuation and one for riding it out in place (for the Category 1-2 size hurricanes).

Then I think we’re here for a weekend, and then it starts again. Ack!

All of this makes it very hard to get much writing done. I’m creeping along this week at about 3 pages a day–on the days I get there. Friday will be hopeless this week. I just have to keep plugging.

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Posted in family, the beach, what I'm reading, writing

The Tuesday Blog

Posted on May 20, 2008 | 2 Comments

It’s Tuesday and I’m blogging again. I seem to post a lot of blogs on Tuesday. Mostly because Monday tends to be really crazy and I never manage to make it by here but I Really want to post at least one blog a week so y’all won’t think I’ve forgotten you, and Tuesday seems to be when I can make myself get over here and do it.

The problem is that many times, by the time Tuesday gets here, I can’t think of anything to blog about. I’ve forgotten whatever it was I did over the weekend. Maybe because the weekend seems so far behind me. Anyway, it’s Tuesday again, and I’m blogging.

About what? Um–we went to see Iron Man a week ago Sunday, and out to dinner for Mother’s Day. This past weekend, I overdid it a little on the flower beds and pretty much slept the rest of the weekend–though we did buy some “previously viewed” movies and watched American Gangster Sunday night. I want to go see Prince Caspian, but haven’t found the time yet, and since we’re moving into Graduation Season, I’m not sure when we will. Maybe we can go on a Wednesday, or something.

I did walk on the beach yesterday morning. Still haven’t looked up those silly plover birds, because I can’t find where I put my bird book. I think it’s in my office, but where??? No special observations yesterday–seagulls, shells, sand, water–the beach is always great, and before 8 a.m. on Monday, I pretty much have it to myself.

The writing is moving ahead. Only 3 pages yesterday, but I got 6 today, and now I need to think about my book’s theology before I can forge ahead. Since this book is about spirits, and demons have cropped up already, and ghosts and “ascending”–I have to think about that sort of thing. I know how it works–I just have to figure out how to explain it, and decide how much explaining I want to do at this point.

A fantasy novel requires a lot of explaining, and I’ve set it up so that the explaining makes sense–one of my characters doesn’t know much about the magic and has to be told. But I do sometimes feel as if the story’s getting bogged down in all the explanations. Today, though, it went well. I didn’t expect this particular scene at this point, but it works well, does what I need it to go and sets up one of the major complications that will come into play later. So yeah. I’m feeling good about the writing.

RWA chapter meeting today. I’m totally not interested in this program, but I’m going anyway, because hanging out with other writers and talking writing gets my writerly juices flowing, and I need as much flow as I can get. I also get to hang out at the book store. Yay!

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Posted in life, movies I watched, Old Spirits, writing

Pelicans, and other thoughts

Posted on May 14, 2008 | 1 Comment

The thing about living at the beach is that you have to LIVE at the beach. All that regular, everyday stuff still has to be done, even though the beach is only two blocks away. Cooking, laundry, scrubbing bathrooms, going to work–all that stuff takes up going-to-the-beach time. So you just have to go anyway, and still, somehow get everything done.

I was thinking about this as I walked on the beach today. Tide was in-ish. (Didn’t look for the times in the paper this a.m.) I could walk around the boulders, but the waves still came up–just not too high. I was thinking about how I still had to go home and do stuff, but wasn’t it great that I could spend this little amount of time out communing with nature.

The sargasso seaweed is starting to come in. In places it looks like a crinkly, crocheted blanket, it’s so thick. I’m not sure if the birds eat something on the seaweed, or if they eat the stuff that’s tangled up in/hiding in the seaweed, but the birds–seagulls and sanderlings and plovers and willets–seem to hang out near it and hung through it.

Today, I found the biggest shell yet. Most shells that wash up on our Gulf coast are small. Mostly they’re scallop-type shells in white or black or yellow-stripes, an inch, or maybe two across. The vast majority are much smaller, some smaller than my tiniest toenail. But this one is at least 4 inches across. Maybe 5. Bigger than the palm of my hand, and deep, and almost black. Part of the rim was broken off, but it’s pretty much whole. I also found what I think is a piece of coral. I think it might be brain coral, from my minimal research. No picture of it yet…

I only saw one pelican flying today. Monday, row after row flapped by overhead. Usually I see at least one line of pelicans heading east–maybe it was a wind thing. Yesterday and Monday were very windy, today was less so. Anyway, Monday, I decided to count the numbers of pelicans flying in their lines.

When I was growing up not far from my beach, and would come down to swim and ride the ferry and such–I never saw a single brown pelican, much less a white one. They were quite endangered. One reason I decided to count how many I saw on Monday. I think I’ve also mentioned here that pelicans like to fly single file. I assume this cuts down on the headwind issue, like the wild goose V, but I’ve never seen pelicans fly in an actual V, just single file.

Anyway, I counted two lines of eleven pelicans each. Then one of thirteen. Then one of seventeen pelicans. That’s a lot of pelicans. I was beginning to think that pelicans had a thing for odd numbers–but then I saw two separate lines, flying somewhat close together, of eight pelicans each. One had seven at first, but there was a singleton flying really hard to catch up and fall in at the end of the line. Now I shall do math.

I had to get out a pen and write on the bottom of a cutline page. I saw in one thirty-minute walk sixty-eight (68) brown pelicans. (If I added wrong, please correct my arithmetic in the comments. thank you.) That’s a LOT of pelicans. They were all flying the same direction, so I’m reasonably certain it was 68 different pelicans, not the same ones flying in circles. Which to me is absolutely totally cool, since it was my own childhood when pelicans were so endangered you just did not see them on the island. At all. Oh, and I didn’t count the single pelican I saw flying in to land beside one of the jetties. So that makes 69.

The beach belongs to the birds from dawn to about 10 or 11 a.m. I may go out walking at 8-ish, but the beach is still theirs. They tolerate me grudgingly.

I got started writing a little late. The plumber guy came and fixed the toilet from its intermittent running (which can be shocking while in the shower, since it would run every five minutes and alternately scald/freeze you while it ran) and I took my sweet time cleaning up after the walk. But I still got 3.5 pages written. Did 6 yesterday. I’m not sure I’ll keep what I wrote today–or that I’ll keep it in this location, but it’s written.

Oh. I just remembered. I entered my very first juried art show Saturday. The very first one where I took paintings in and let other people (who are neither relatives or friends) Look at them and decide whether they were worthy of hanging in a show. They were judged in the non-professional category, of course, which probably helped, but there are some very good non-pros. Anyway, one of the two paintings I entered made the cut. (I suck at painting/drawing hands and feet. And arms. Some arms, anyway.) I didn’t win a prize, but I made the cut.

So my painting of Robert is going to be hung in this art show. (It’s in the blog archive if the other link doesn’t work. I can’t figure out how to post it on the blog with this work Mac. Just scroll down till you see the painting of the person near the bottom…)(If you want to see it.)

I’ll take a picture at the show, so you can see it hanging with other people looking at it. 😉

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Posted in life, pelicans, the beach, thoughts, writing