Category Archives: writing

Beach Reports begin again

Posted on April 24, 2008 | 2 Comments

Not that they’ll be any better than sporadic until I get my time organized a little better. But I did get out to walk on the beach yesterday. It was in the evening, so quite a few people were out still enjoying the day. I found my new shorts I bought for my friend’s visit that I didn’t get to wear because a cold front blew in and we had to wear jackets to walk on the beach. I found my flip-flops. And I drove to the beach and Walked.

The water is WARM! YAY!!! At last. It’s not bathwater warm like it will be in September, but it’s warm enough for a pleasant swim, if the sun’s out and the wind’s not blowing too hard. I admit it. I’m a wimp when it comes to swimming water temperature. It comes from living in Texas so many years. If it’s not at LEAST 90 degrees (32+ C) air temp, I’m not going in, and 95 F (35C) is better. Either that, or the water had better be warm. I’ve been swimming in hot springs pools when the air was “brisk” and that was acceptable. But I don’t like to be cold when I’m wet. So, now that the water’s reaching the 70 F (21 C) range, and the air’s pretty consistently close to 80 F (26.6 C), I ought to be able to go out one day soon and enjoy a little wave action in the water.

The thing I like best about the Gulf coast surf is that there isn’t much of it. We just don’t get the big surfing waves that they get on the Pacific coast. Have I said this before here? I just really like the fact that the surf doesn’t beat you to death, and that it’s easy to go out past the surf, where the water is still just chest deep, and let the non-breaking waves just rock you. It’s infinitely relaxing to touch sand between the waves, then ride gently over them as they come rolling in to break (not too violently) twenty or so yards farther in toward shore. Soon. Maybe this weekend. (Though I have plans–Saltgrass Potters spring art show and sale, and maybe the garden club plant sale over in Bayou Vista.) (And getting the car washed. I did get the license plate and its holder put back on my car. Had a bit of a close encounter with a large trailer hitch in the parking lot at Fish Tales… But the beast (aka, my vehicle) is still filthy.)

About the beach–okay, the water was warm. Swimmers were out. Not much seaweed, and it was mostly the little crinkly stuff. No jellyfish yesterday. Lots of shells, and I even found half a sand dollar. First hint of a sand dollar I’ve seen in the 7 or 8 months I’ve been here. So I took it.

Today is our 32nd anniversary, and the fella was, as usual, up to par. I received a lovely arrangement of yellow roses (he knows I like other colors better than red) and some very interesting purple bud-like flower before I had to leave for the paper. (Where I am currently sloughing off by writing this blog post.) I think we’re going to celebrate Saturday with dinner out, and Charlie Wilson’s War at home. We meant to go see it in the theater, and never did make it, and I don’t think there’s anything out now that we really want to go see. I will try and remember to report back in… TRY.

Think I’m through the “going back to fix” pages in the writing, and can start forging ahead with new stuff. If only I can remember where I thought I was going from here… Hmmm. Well, I can write it, and then if I have to, fix it.

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Posted in family, Old Spirits, the beach, writing

Writer’s Weekend

Posted on April 7, 2008 | 4 Comments


I had a wonderful weekend. A Writer’s Weekend.

My best friend–the one I went to New Mexico and Arizona on a research trip with a couple of years ago–came down to the island on Friday with her husband, because she didn’t want to drive through the big-city traffic by herself. My fella was out of town on business, but her guy did very well staying out of the way. 😉

I took them out to lunch at my favorite “local’s hot-spot”, and then we went downtown to see the hawk show they were having for FeatherFest. (This bird is actually a Sea Eagle, and he’s checking us out.) After the hawks and a walk around town to look in a few shops, we had ice cream at the son’s favorite ice cream parlor. (Mine, too. But I won’t let myself go there unless we have company in town.) We drove around the historical district a little bit, and then headed back to the house for a little while.

B and I (we sign our e-mails by initials only–I think I started it because I’m bone-lazy, but our little group all started doing it, since we all have names with different initials–and now we call each other by our initials) had exchanged a few pages for critique, so we went out on the back covered patio to go over our pages, and while we were out there, it rained. We were under the roof, so we didn’t get wet, but after an hour or so, it started getting cold and we went in. Had supper at Tortuga’s Mexican Restaurant and watched the wind blow the palmettos around. Then we went back home again and plotted a book for B.

She brought her sticky notes and her big foamcore plotting board and her tape recorder (which kept stopping intermittently unless she smacked it–we decided it had become masochistic…) and a spiral notebook and her AlphaSmart. I never realized just how much equipment was necessary for plotting a story. 😉 She had a huge cowboy boot box for the sticky notes, because the first time we tried plotting with sticky notes, we kept saying things like “We need more colors–we need a color for the villain, and for the hero’s internal conflict, and for the suspense subplot, and for–” So every time she sees sticky notes in the store, she checks to see if they’re a color she doesn’t have already. I think she has enough sticky notes to last the rest of her life.

By this time, we were really tired, so we went to bed. Her fella had crashed a while back–the driving stress tuckered him out.

Saturday, we got up, drove to McDonald’s for some breakfast take-out, and after we ate it, we plotted a book for me. Of course, I have more books plotted than I have time to write, and am having to take a week off working on Old Spirits to drive back to the panhandle this week and supervise the moving of the rest of the furniture, so I’m going to be writing even less (which upsets me no end), but we plotted yet another book for me. While we were plotting, her hubby went out walking down the seawall. He went into every souvenir shop along the way, and wound up walking all the way to 6th Street. Which is almost 5 miles from our street. And then he had to walk back. We’d have come to get him if he’d called, but he never did…

B and I went out and walked a couple of miles on the beach-or maybe only one. I was too busy talking and looking at all the birds to pay attention. I even saw some terns. We did walk out on one of the jetties–one with a paved walking path. It was quite chilly, or we might have gone walking earlier, but we wanted to wait for it to warm up. And we still wore out windbreakers to go walking. We weren’t really hungry, so we went back to the house and had peanut butter cheese crackers and watched movies, then went out to one of the better seafood houses on the island for supper. (Had the charcoal grilled/fried shrimp combo–very good.) The man in the house was snoring by 10 p.m., because of his 10-mile hike…

Sunday, we got up and did speed-writing drills. We wrote 10 opening sentences. Not opening sentences to anything in particular, just opening sentences. Then we switched pages, and drew numbers, and wrote scenes to go with the opening sentence that matched that number. I got one that said, “Oh, honey, with a package like that, I’ll do ya for free.” (B is a stinker, because she KNEW I would have to write from her sentences, and put that one in just so I’d have to write something beginning with that… :P) It was a lot of fun, and we laughed a lot.

After that, I had mentioned a free reception and tours of one of the big mansion museums on the island, so we went to that–looked at all the stuff on display in the basement, and went upstairs to look at the living area and take pictures on the spiffy-cool front porch and such. (This is B and her fella on one end of the porch–yes, it’s a round gazebo-y area.) Then we went to eat at a Louisiana-style seafood place downtown, and look at the stores on that end of the street. And then, alas, it was time to say goodbye.

Most of the time, there are at least three of us on our Writers’ Weekends, but our third couldn’t get away this time. But since, despite his ten-mile hike and aching legs, her husband had a good time on the island, I don’t think I’ll have a lot of trouble convincing them to come back. Maybe if my fella’s here next time, the guys can go fishing. I know mine likes to fish, and I think hers does too… We didn’t even ride the ferry or go out to the state park. And maybe our third can come next time too… Can’t wait.

Now I have to just get busy writing Old Spirits, so I can write another couple chapters of Thunder, and get a little farther toward finishing it, and then I can write Time Catch, and then I can write the third, still-nameless blood-magic universe book, and then I can write this book we just plotted. Sometime in 2010, maybe???

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Posted in Old Spirits, pastimes, the beach, Thunder in a Cloudless Sky, Time Catcher, trips, writing

Stuck!

Posted on April 2, 2008 | Leave a comment

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it here before, but I usually don’t get writer’s block. I’m not going to say I never get it, because sure as shooting, I’ll come down with a raging case next blink of my eyes, but I can’t remember having a lot of trouble writing, except once when I got into a knock-down drag-out argument with my hero who refused to do something until I pointed out to him the situation, and he finally admitted that he probably would do what I wanted him to do–but he’d be real upset with himself the next day.

There you go–I’m queen of the run-on sentence. Anyway, like I said, I don’t usually just come to a complete and grinding halt and find myself unable to write another word. I get the stupids. That’s where every word that flows out of the pen is just … stupid. The narrative is stupid. The dialog is stupid, the characters are Stupid and everything is just Stupid, STUPID, STUPID! However, this week–okay, today–it’s been rough going. I kept having to stop to figure stuff out.

It wasn’t so much that I had to stop for research, though I did need to be sure that people have to go before a magistrate to have a bail set, and that solicitors are the ones who accompany someone for bail, in England. But I could have fudged that. Left gaps till I had time to do more thorough research. (Besides, I have a source in the newsroom–Ian the Brit answers all kinds of questions willingly for me.)(And I’m going to have to break down and get a historical map of London. Sigh.)

Where I really ran into problems was when I realized I didn’t know exactly how the magic worked that I was using. I hadn’t thought things through, and I needed to. I needed to know how magicians interacted with the spirits they call, and what the morality of the magic was. That stuff was important. And I figured out that conjury was as inherently moral as sorcery, in my universe. I even had to understand the rules for heaven and hell.

I still don’t know everything about how this magic works. I need to look up some of the stuff I figured out for the previous book, but took out of the pages. I can’t find it in notes or deleted materials–I may not have typed it into the computer. In which case, I KNOW it’s in the first draft tucked away in its 3-ring binder…somewhere. I don’t think I’ve moved the binders yet. In which case, they’ll get moved down here in the next couple of weeks, when we move all our furniture to the island. But it might be here…

Anyway, it’s frustrating when I have to stop and work out stuff I really should have worked out earlier–but I sorta thought I already had. I mean, I wrote a whole book set in this universe. It just didn’t occur to me that I’d be writing about a different kind of magic in more detail than I had in the previous book. And honestly, even if I had worked out stuff about conjury ahead of time, I would still be discovering things about it as I write. I never know all the secrets till I get there. Sometimes, I do make them up. But sometimes, they just sort of…come.

All kinds of things bubble up out of that swamp, and I never know what it will be next.

Manticores have made a recent appearance…

Oh! AND, I have ridden my new red Schwinn bicycle all the way to 39th Street today!! That is 53rd Street to 39th Street, plus the two blocks from the subdivision–and back again. Farther than I’ve been able to take myself before. My knees may whine for the next few days, but I got past 45th Street, which means I rode more than 2 miles.

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Posted in bicycles, fantasy, Old Spirits, writing

Beautiful Day

Posted on March 24, 2008 | Leave a comment

Actually, it was a whole beautiful weekend. Saturday was Absolutely Gorgeous, here in island-land. A cold front blew in on Sunday, but it was still really nice. Just jacket nice, instead of shirtsleeve nice.

Oh, I have to share–I went out one day last week to walk along the beach, instead of riding the bicycle. Wore the flip-flops, since it’s been warming up, and did my usual “walk barefoot on the sand, put on flipflops to cross the jetties” trick. The weather was beautiful–just breezy enough to be cool and comfortable. But that water was COLD!!

And I didn’t even get into the water. I just walked on the wet sand. Still cold. Cold, Cold COLD!

Interesting tidbit–I was walking along and noticed swirls and waves of what looked a little like those flat-bottomed glass beads you can get at the craft stores to glue on stuff. (They had some on the wall at Tortuga’s Mexican Restaurant.) But they weren’t beads. They were little bitty, thumbnail-sized jellyfish. Every so often, a big twelve-inch jellyfish would be washed up, but mostly, there were just these waves of baby ones. I was very careful not to step on even the little ones, because those jellyfish can sting like wildfire, and I didn’t have my shoes on. There were so many of them, it was kind of hard not to step on them sometimes…

The boy and his girlfriend and the granddog came to visit and they actually went to the beach and got in the water. Brrrr! I have pictures. (Of Dolly the dog, not any people) I’ll have to download and post them.

And we all went bike riding. The fella brought the last of the bikes down from the panhandle house, so we had a bicycle for everyone. And I made it past 61st Street before the knees gave out! That may have been partly due to the fact that the seawall sidewalk was very crowded and I kept having to slow down to get around bunches of people taking up the whole sidewalk, but I rode Past 61st Street. That’s at least as far as riding past 45th Street going the other way, so I made my goal. Went out the very next day to ride again, and didn’t make it that far, so I obviously have more “building up” to do on the legs, but it’s a start…

The writing is chugging along. I feel like I’m not getting anywhere, but really, I am. I guess I feel that way because I keep having to go back and fill things in. What I wrote today, I’m worried I may have to take out and condense. I feel like I ought to Know what to leave out and what to put in when I write it…but I don’t. I just throw it all in, and then have to slash and burn when it comes time to revise. Less planning, less clothing, more doing.

Onward and upward.

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Posted in bicycles, family, life, Old Spirits, the beach, writing

Adventures in Parent-land

Posted on March 18, 2008 | Leave a comment

I’m still tired. Went to help unpack the parents. Totally forgot sticky notes, but the sister had them at her house, so my niece made them out for the cabinets.

We worked like mules trying to get boxes unpacked and things put away, at least in the kitchen, trying to get the living room usable and the beds put together so we’d have a place to sleep. The sister and I worked. Mama was having chest pains. (She does that when she gets overworked.) The sister-in-law came over and worked too. She was the driving force to get the living room organized.

The house will be good for them, but it needs more work than I realized. For instance, the master bath was demolished for remodeling, only the remodeling never got done. So the master bath has no walls, no shower stall to go with the shower head, no floor… You get the idea. The other bath works, but it’s pretty worn. Then they had sewer trouble the day after I left to go home. And I’m worried about them being able to coordinate things and remembering to get it done. It really needs to be done as soon as possible.

My brother-in-law is disabled, so he’s home most of the time, and if the pain’s not too bad, he can make phone calls and help them out some. He was there organizing–we had to watch him like a hawk to make sure he didn’t try to move anything, though.

Downsizing will be a struggle for them–and we’ll be working on some downsizing too, I think, in the next few weeks.

Finished my character interviews this morning, so I’ll probably get back into the writing (I hope) tomorrow. This is for Old Spirits. Got to get rolling on that.

Weather’s kind of iffy to go out to the seawall today–lots of wind, clouds. Maybe even rain–can’t tell through the windows at the newsroom. Maybe just fog or mist. We’ll see how it is thirty minutes from now. I do think it’s far enough into spring that it’s safe to put all the houseplants outside if I put them under the covered porch where the wind can’t get them. I just hope the salt fog can’t get to them either. It gets to the cars every so often…

Oh! The house has azaleas outside the breakfast room window. I’ve always loved azaleas, but have never lived anywhere they would grow. I’m going to find my clippers and go out and cut some. Maybe a rose, too, if one of them looks good.

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Posted in family, fantasy, flowers and gardening, Old Spirits, writing

Stuff

Posted on March 13, 2008 | Leave a comment

My life is full of stuff. Stuff I have to do. Stuff I want to do. Stuff I want to read. Stuff I have to do something with. Stuff I have to clean or put away or fold up or…something.

I really need to start writing Old Spirits, but I have too much stuff to do. Tomorrow, I’m leaving to go meet the parents at their new house and help them get unpacked and organized. I need to remember to take lots of Post-it Notes to label their kitchen cabinets and drawers, so they can remember where they’ve put things. A large part of this move is because both of them are starting to have trouble with their rememberers. They did pretty good while it was just Mama forgetting stuff, but now Daddy’s started having trouble, so we’re happy they can move so close to one of us children. But I really need to be there to help with the unpacking.

However, going to help them means I don’t have to go to the panhandle for most of the week. It’s either a really long 12-hour drive back to our old house, or a two-day trip, and since the fella has next week of for spring break, he’s making the trek to turn the water on and get stuff ready to move the rest of our furniture to the coast. More stuff. And way too much moving. But we’re tired of camping out. I want my dresser. And my own bed. (We bought a new queen-size, which will move into the guest room, but I miss my king-size…)

Anyway, there’s a lot of traveling and a lot of moving in my future. I have confirmed that I’m going to ApolloCon, the SF/Fantasy con in Houston, in June. I will probably go to RWA National in San Francisco at the end of July (need to find a roomie). I’m still debating whether I want to go to ArmadilloCon in Austin in August. There’s a FenCon in Dallas in September, but I have to see if the dates conflict with a potential trip to New York the fella’s invited me on.

There is the possibility that Tor will have galleys/ARCs of New Blood for me to sign at the Tor booksigning in San Francisco. I’ll let you know if that pans out.

I did get all my RITA books read and judged. An interesting experience, to say the least. I read a lot of books outside my usual reading comfort level–and liked them.

Next week. The writing will begin, next week. Definitely. The fella’s out of town. I’ve caught up on all the stuff. (I think.) I can write.

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

Interesting New Development

Posted on January 28, 2008 | 1 Comment

I have a new dayjob.

It just sorta fell into my lap. I saw the ad and recognized that it would be perfect for me, and saved the page of the paper, but after I carried it into the office, I forgot about it for a couple of days. Until late the night before we were leaving town. So in the morning, after I finished packing, I took a few minutes and threw together something resembling a resume, slapped it in an e-mail and left town.

That afternoon, I got a call from the lady, and by the time I hung up, I was pretty sure I’d been hired, although nobody ever quite said so in those exact words. However, when I talked to her again on Friday (again on the phone), we made arrangements for me to take the required drug test (I have caught a cold, and between that and my regular meds, there’s no telling how that will turn out) and to come in for training.

What will I be doing that makes this job so perfect? Basically, I will be a glorified typist. With clean-up duties. It’s a part-time position at the local newspaper with the grandiose title of Editorial Assistant. (Newspapers are good at handing out grandiose titles. When I worked years ago as the only staff on a weekly paper (except for the guy who did sports), I was called “Managing Editor.” But I still had to develop all the pictures I took myself–plus write all the copy and cutlines and whatever else needed writing.) I will type into the computer all the Community Bulletin Board items people turn in, so they can be laid out on the page. And whatever else needs doing.

I pretty much get to set my hours, which means I’ll still be able to write in the mornings, and I won’t have to stand on my feet twenty hours a week. For a gramma–er, Gigi with bad knees, that’s a plus. Now maybe I can support my conference habit. :)

In other news, I have caught a cold and did not go to any Mardi Gras activities this weekend.
I am halfway through my RITA books. Four more to go–unless they send me a second panel of books, which they have done in years past. (I do volunteer for them.) I also need to judge this other contest I volunteered to help with.

And I need to send some pages to critique to my cps. We haven’t critiqued any in the last few years, and I’ve missed it.

This means I need to get back into the writing. But I have to go cough up a lung or two first. (Hack, hack, wheeze)

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Posted in dayjob, life, writing

Life, Interrupted

Posted on January 25, 2008 | 1 Comment

But then, isn’t interruption life’s constant?

This week has been the pits as far as getting any writing done. I think I got a page on Monday. Maybe two. It was a holiday for the fella, and he didn’t stay gone as long as I thought he would. Tuesday, he had a meeting in Austin, so I went to visit the aging parents, and shopped for fabric with Mom for my costume for the Victorian Christmas festival.

Mom is getting forgetful, and kept saying things like “Oh, that will be so hot.” Whereupon I had to remind her (several times) that no, the festival is at Christmas, and it won’t be hot, but might be warm, which is why I picked a pattern with a jacket, so I could take the jacket off, if it was warm. We looked at a bunch of stores and a bunch of possibilities–black, seafoam green, a pinkish lavender (really nice suiting wool), and even a gorgeous satin in royal blue with embroidered silver butterflies. I figured I needed to pick the jacket fabric first, then pick the fabric(s) to make the dress to go with the jacket. And there wasn’t enough of the only fabric that I really thought would go with the blue and silver to make the huge, hoop skirt. (Good grief, I’m probably going to have to make a hooped petticoat too, huh?)

So, my costume is going to be red. Not a bright red, more of a dark cranberry red. The jacket is a jacquard upholstery fabric–the kind with texture in a floral pattern. But it will work for jackets too. The skirt is a darker red, almost maroon–I kept having to explain to Mom that no, I didn’t want a white or cream skirt, even though that was what the pattern showed, because this festival is outdoors, and I didn’t want to be dragging a white skirt through the streets–and the bodice will be an old-fashioned pink rosebud stripe (pink stripes alternating with pink and green rosebuds on off-white), so I think it will look very mid-Victorian-ish. The construction is VERY complicated, which is why I’m starting now. I’ve got eleven months to finish it. I’ve got six weeks to cut it out, before I can go get my sewing machine. So this is my project for the year, even though I haven’t finished projects from previous years. I will probably be putting in the miles and miles of hem the Friday night before the event, knowing me.

Ah well. Now I’ll have to give a regular “costume report” too… (It’s lined, both jacket and bodice, and interfaced, and there’s supposed to be boning in the bodice, which I don’t know if I will put in, but we will see…) Seriously, y’all, wish me luck.

I did actually think about the writing while I was there. The aging parents are getting ready to move–even though they haven’t actually put their house on the market yet–and have been going through their books. They found a copy of my old Master’s thesis on China missions, and I read through most of it, checking on my research. A couple of things I thought I remembered, but couldn’t confirm, I found in there–like the city on the Yangtze usually referred to as Wuhan is actually made up of three cities on 3 sides of the river (it’s very river-y right there), Wuchang, Hanyang and Hankow–I don’t know how they’d be spelled in the current transliteration, though. Anyway–I could remember Hankow, but couldn’t remember what the other two cities were. And they had a huge world atlas where I looked up the maps of China to check on city names and geography of my story, etc. So I did think about it. Just didn’t do any. Also judged a contest.

Haven’t done any writing today either. Had a dentist appointment this a.m. and now have very clean teeth, and no need to go back for more work. (YAY!!) Other things are developing–but I’ll share when I know more.

Think I’m going to stay in out of the cold nasty wind and rain (mostly drizzle, but it rained hard on me when I ran into the post office) and coddle the cold I’m trying to get so I can sing Sunday a.m. Good thing I essentially sing bass. I have never (knock on wood) completely lost my voice, but it has been known to drop into the cellar. I used to scare my Girl Scouts when I got hoarse, because my voice got so deep and rough. And maybe I’ll try to get a newsletter out. I’ve owed one to my subscribers for a while now…

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Posted in life, pastimes, Thunder in a Cloudless Sky, trips, volunteering, writing

TIME!

Posted on January 17, 2008 | 5 Comments


As in, I need more of it! It’s running away and I can’t catch it!

Actually, I think it’s dribbling through those cracks in the sidewalk. Or something. I’m not sure how it gets away from me. Hmm. It may soak into the white space on the pages of books…

ANYWAY. Life has absolutely NOT slowed down. Made a mad dash trip to Fort Worth last week for a nephew’s Eagle Scout court of honor. It was great. Everybody in this picture, except the guy behind the guy in the red shirt, is a relative. And all the guys are Eagle Scouts.

Now see, to me, that is what constitutes an Alpha male. Eagle Scouts are quintessential alpha males. They are leaders and protectors, but they’re not arrogant SOBs, because most of the time, you can’t be a real SOB and get people to follow you. There’s a difference between expecting and inspiring people to do what they’re supposed to do and browbeating them into doing what you want or controlling their every move. Admittedly, I’ve met a few Eagle Scouts who tend to get a little controlling, but very, very few, especially given the number of Eagles I know. In order to become an Eagle Scout, not only do they have to earn the requisite number of merit badges (which isn’t an easy thing), but they have to plan and lead others in a service project, which can range from painting fire hydrants to demo work on old, dangerous church playgrounds. They’re not supposed to do the work themselves, but organize the troop and the community to do it. And believe me, teenaged boys aren’t going to put themselves out for an arrogant jerk. If a guy can get past his “jerk” phase as a teenager, usually he’s not going back to it later on.

Okay, there’s my segue on what I think makes an alpha male and why I tend to write about good guys. I know too many of them. :)

So. I got back from the trip north and labored mightily to get back into the writing. Monday, it was a real, true struggle. I just want to get my 25 pages on Thunder written for this month, and it seemed even my own brain was conspiring to keep me from it. I wrote a grand total of 3 pages. Tuesday was better. I wrote 7. (Yay!) Then I drove across the causeway for my RWA chapter meeting. (I DO love being in a town where I can actually attend monthly meetings.)

I have to go early, because if I don’t get across the causeway by 4:30 at the latest, I can’t really get across till around 6:30 because of rush hour traffic. I barely made it out in time. And it was raining. But I spent my time usefully. I picked up a pattern for my costume for next December’s Victorian Christmas festival. (Knowing how slow I am, yes, I have to begin now.) I bought some fabric remnants to use for “green” Christmas wrapping. I bought some books. And of course, when it was time to head to the meeting, it was still raining, and there was a wreck backing up traffic. (sigh) Anyway, it was a great meeting. Colleen Thompson gave a terrific talk on emotional impact from the very beginning. And then I went for a “nightcap” with some of the other members. I didn’t get back to my island before midnight. (It is a pretty long way to where we meet…) But, since it was still raining, and a lot harder than it had been, I got wet coming in the house, and stayed up a while to finish my book and dry off.

So I was up really late, which made me next to worthless during my Wednesday writing time. (See, there was a point that tied back to my main point, which has to do with time.) I was pretty much worthless all day Wednesday. The only thing I accomplished on my daily list of things to do (very low tech, kept in a little, fat notebook) was to write four pages. At least I did get four.

So today, I had a LOT to catch up on. Updating the website. (It is updated! With new pictures!) Making a dentist appointment. (I think I have a filling coming out.) Paying RWA chapter dues. (I’m a member of 6 chapters. (Ack!) Three land-based and three online.) Buying caffeine free Dr Pepper for the inlaws visit starting tomorrow. Joining the Art League. (I haven’t painted a thing in 5 months, and I miss it!) I even handwashed all the dishes, because the dishwasher still isn’t repaired. Oh, and I also got 6 pages written.

I had to persist and crank and make myself not look stuff up in research books, because even on the days I got more written, I caught myself procrastinating. I would realize that I wasn’t writing, I was looking at a map of the island that just happened to be sitting on the card table where I write first drafts. (We haven’t moved the desk down yet.) Or pick up a research book to look up a name and catch myself reading the parts of it that I hadn’t read and that didn’t really apply to my book. Today, I did a little better, but it was still tough, because I finished the scene I knew about, and didn’t exactly know where to go next, but I kept going anyway and made junk up. That’s what writing is, right? Making junk up.

So, I have 5 more pages to write tomorrow to earn my charm. I have to write 5 more than that (10 total) to make my goals for my “procrastination” loop, and I don’t know if I’ll make the ten. With company coming, I won’t really be able to write over the weekend, and I’m planning a trip to visit my forgetful parents next week… I don’t have time for a dayjob!

Okay, so all I can do is gut it up and keep working. Think “Buy” thoughts at all those editors out there for me, okay?

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Posted in family, life, painting, pastimes, Thunder in a Cloudless Sky, trips, writing

New Orleans Rises

Posted on December 12, 2007 | 1 Comment


Actually, New Orleans is still about the same height it always was from everything I remember, but downtown and the French Quarter never did flood, even during the worst of Katrina. Anyway, just got back from a few days there where I had a great time, but pretty much walked my legs right off. Yep, that’s right, I’m walking around on nubs now.

They had Katrina tours you could take, right from the hotel where we stayed, downtown, across the street from Harrah’s. I didn’t take one because I sorta felt like it was battening on somebody else’s misery. Maybe it’s not, but I felt that way. And after the four hours of walking we did on Saturday, I was afraid any tour might involve more of that, and I wanted to know exactly how much walking I was going to do and where I was going.

The St. Charles Street streetcar is back in operation, but it only goes out to Napoleon Street, about half as far as its normal route. I didn’t think the Garden District was under water, which is mostly past Napoleon, but maybe it did get wet. The route out to Napoleon Street had just recently reopened, but Copeland’s, a restaurant on that corner we really liked, was all boarded up and didn’t look like anybody had any intentions of re-opening it. We did ride the streetcar, if you couldn’t tell. Didn’t take my camera out that day, though, and when I did, the streetcars were rather elusive.

The hotel where we stayed was maybe half a mile from the French Quarter. It took us about ten minutes to walk down to the Cafe du Monde on Sunday morning. There was a line waiting to get in at the Cafe du Monde, however, and no line at the little Cafe Beignet across the street, so we–the fella, me and one of his co-workers–crossed the street and had our beignets and coffee there. Except I was the only one who had beignets (the fella being allergic to wheat), and I had milk with mine. The pregnant lady had decaf caffe latte, and the fella had ham and eggs. Which you can’t get at Cafe du Monde, so really, the alternate was a better choice for us.

I had beignets every morning we were in New Orleans. Frankly, I pigged out the whole time we were there, though pigging out on fish isn’t quite as piggy as pigging out on…well, pigs. Or cows. The hotel backed up to the riverfront mall, and there was a little Cafe du Monde branch office on the first floor of the mall, that opened up an hour before the rest of the mall did. So Monday and Tuesday, I walked over to the mall and had my beignets there. Sat outside and watched the river. (That was the view–the cruise ship wasn’t always there leaving port, but that’s the bridge over to Algiers…)

The rest of this might as well be a list of what I ate too. Saturday night, we took the college folks to dinner at Carmelo’s–corner of Toulouse and Decatur, a couple of blocks from Jackson Square. Italian-style fish. The fella and I shared some calamari (the kind with squiggles included), then had redfish with a fresh tomato-caper sauce, and I had my very first cannelloni, believe it or not. Deelish.

Sunday night, we had dinner with an old friend from the fella’s doctoral class who’s a bigwig in Kentucky now. Went to Ralph and Kakoo’s on Toulouse Street, and–after some fried crawdad tails (aka Cajun popcorn) (our friend got his first taste of crawfish) I dined upon the Shrimp Henry, which the Chef Henry apparently made up that night. It was grilled shrimp stuffed with cheesy spinach stuffing over angel hair pasta with Rockefeller sauce on top. Very yummy.

Then Monday night, we went out with the college folks again, to a place called Tommy’s in the warehouse district. On Tchoupitoulas (I may have left a few vowels out of that streetname, or moved them around in the wrong places, but that looks really close…) Street. Tommy’s had Italian overtones, but wasn’t too, too Italian. At Tommy’s, I had a Caesar salad, then had Veal Sorrentina, with eggplant and cheese and Marsala mushroom sauce on top. (I can get fish & shrimp here, but veal is harder to come by.) It came with these really neat matchstick sweet potatoes cooked almost dry–really good, and different. Then the pregnant lady and I each had creme brulee and the other lady in the group had strawberries with homemade ice cream.

This doesn’t count the fudge I bought that I snacked on way too much. They had it in New Orleans praline flavor, and it tastes JUST like pralines. I told the fella that the chocolate fudge was for me and the praline was for him…but I’m eating too much of the praline flavor too. There are a couple of candy shops downtown here…good thing I don’t go downtown too often, huh?

I did finish my Christmas shopping…”best of the best” Louisiana cookbooks and specialty measuring spoons. And I wandered the French Quarter and took lots of pictures at the perfect time of day to get some good shadows and shots.

I also got a little writing done. Not much, but a few pages. Still working on the SF story, though I need to switch to the WWII story long enough to get my pages done for the month. Don’t know if the brain is working that way though. I’m writing stuff, but may have to slash the whole of it. Oh well.

Have one more week before the daughter, s-i-l and grandboy come for the holidays. She’s supposed to be bringing the tamale recipe. Need to buy a pork roast to cook for the filling…or maybe brisket. Brisket makes good tamales too… but you GOT to have tamales for Christmas Eve, or it’s just not Christmas…

Cold front supposed to be moving in today. It’s been hot. Hot in New Orleans (okay, it was mostly just humid, but that made ME hot) and hot at home. I’m ready for that cold front to get here.

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Posted in cooking, food, Thunder in a Cloudless Sky, Time Catcher, trips, writing