The veil will be lifted. Please drop by.
Tag: blogging
Photo Challenge: Dialogue #2: Socks
The photo display below illustrates what happens when the photographer reads the rules but immediately forgets them. Instead of photos engaged in dialogue, she shoots photos of objects engaged in dialogue.
It also shows what happens when one sock of each pair is eaten by the dryer: Those left behind have nothing to do but sit around and talk.
If there’s any justice in this world, this will be the last inane piece I’ll post, at least for a while. The previous post spotlighting the filthy mouse appeared because I was trying to attach my blog to Bloglovin‘ and wasn’t sure it would work, and I wanted to do more than post a possibly unworkable link. And after reading reams of instructions and not being convinced I understood them, I was disgusted enough to advertise the state of my refrigerator’s underside. I do move the appliance to mop, but I’m not compulsive about it. And I don’t want to offend by tossing my children’s favorite toy. Unfortunately, sponging mousie off does nothing for its appearance.
WordPress advises not to post when you have nothing to say. Once more I’ve violated the rule. Forgive me. As atonement, I offer socks and a cat.*
Also, please forgive the sock with the hole. I don’t wear it unless I want to make a statement. Then I pair it with the adjacent mismatch. I’m not comfortable that way, but people know that I’m my own person and that I have no shame.
See what other photographers have posted to this week’s photo challenge here.
*Sometimes, like around midnight, I post from impulse. Sometimes I’m just weak.
The House
Only Day 2, and I’m already tempted to drop out of Writing 101.
Yesterday I had all day. I started early, ignored the instructions and wrote what and how I wanted, and took my time doing it. Fine.
Today I had both morning and afternoon meetings, and now I’m as tired as I was when I had an eight-to-five job. In addition, I don’t like the topic. There’s no place I want to beam up to right now except bed. I’m trying to get my sleep patterns straightened out, and I can’t do that if I stay up writing.
Furthermore–and this the heart of the matter–I don’t like doing descriptive writing. I’m not good at it. When reading, I often skim or skip. I miss a lot of great prose, I know, but I prefer to get on to what the characters are doing. A professor remarked that Hemingway‘s description of the scenery during a drive through the Pyrenees in The Sun Also Rises was some of the finest writing in the English language. We had just read the novel. I tried to look as if I agreed about the quality of the description I hadn’t noticed.
Now that I’ve expressed my discontent with the topic, I’ll move on to a place I memorized:
My great-grandmother’s house two blocks from the house where I grew up. After you cross FM 20, the street angles off toward the left, and the one house and the foliage between hid Grandmama’s house from ours. The houses weren’t far apart, but when you crossed the two-lane road we called “the highway,” and the street made that little jog you felt like you were in a different part of town altogether.
My great-grandmother died three years before I was born. When I was a child I called it “Aunt Ethel’s house” for the great-aunt who lived there. When my uncle inherited it, it became “Donald’s house.” My father, who, with his four brothers, had lived there as a child, after his mother died called it simply “the house.” “I’m going up to the house,” he would say. No one ever asked him to explain.
It sat on the corner a block from Main Street, a white frame house with a big front porch. At each end a door led to a bedroom; the door to the living room was in the middle. Queen’s crown growing up the brick supports (pillars and columns sound too grand) and provided shade in summer and sometimes a measure of privacy. Inside there was no privacy at all: there were lots of windows, and most rooms had french doors. That they had sheers was little comfort. When we spent the night there once, my mother commented it was like living in a fish bowl. Surrounded by trees, it was hot in summer. On winter nights, when propane space heaters were turned off, it was absolutely freezing.
While my father called it “the house,” my mother called it “Grand Central Station.” Two of Grandmama’s sons lived across the street. Their children and grandchildren were in and out all day. Some walked in through the front door, stopped in the kitchen for a glass of water, and walked out the back without saying Hello. (I always said Hello.) When there was a funeral, four generations met there for lunch, sitting in the dining room, spilling out onto the front porch and the back yard. Those who lived there gathered there in the evenings. Mother offended my father early in their marriage by saying she’d rather stay home and listen to Jack Benny on the radio.
By the time I was out of high school, things had changed. For the first time, I knocked on the door before walking in. The house was no longer a gathering place. Later, it passed out of the family, and none of us went there at all.
Several years ago, I was invited back. An estate sale had been scheduled, and the auctioneer, knowing that many things there had been in my family for years, allowed me to come in for a pre-sale sale. I bought an old china cheese keeper that my mother had coveted, and some demitasse spoons from what had probably been Grandmama’s first set of flatware, and a place setting of the flatware used daily when I was a child, entirely utilitarian and, in my opinion, about the ugliest pattern imaginable.
It was strange being back after all those years. I remembered huge bedrooms, huge living room and dining room . . . Everything had shrunk. Except the porch. There was still room for several card tables of domino-playing ladies on summer afternoons.
For years, I felt as if that house belonged as much to me as to the great-aunts and the uncle who lived there. When it passed into new hands, I was sad. But it was a house. People had made it special.
The house was sold. My memories were not.
*****
Recently, the house was sold again, this time to a friend. I’m pleased to know it’s in good hands.
Related articles
One Pure Thought From My Wild Mind
Never again.
That’s what I said when I received my M.A. No more school. I’d learned enough. More to the point, I’d stayed up for thirty-six hours at a stretch drafting and typing reams of literary criticism too many times. I’d tired of having to take off the weight (peanut butter) that appeared with each paper. The Idylls of the King alone added five pounds.
Six years later, after receiving library certification, I said the same thing. Enough.
Now here I am in summer school. WordPress’ Writing 101. Post every day in June.
Several years ago, I tried posting every day for a year from January 1 but fell out around March. It was fun but exhausting–sometimes Emily Dickinson had to step in for a guest post–and I had no energy to write anything else. I don’t write fast. I revise and edit as I go. (Please don’t bother telling me I shouldn’t.) I suffer; how I suffer.
But last night I saw the word challenge, which is the emotional equivalent of chocolate, and my resistance is low, so I cratered and registered. It’s just one month with weekends off, so perhaps I will last it out. The catch is that WP provides a topic and a twist.
Today’s topic, or goal, is to unlock the mind: free write for twenty minutes. Follow Natalie Goldberg and access the pure thoughts and ideas of your wild mind.
Today’s twist is to post the free write. It doesn’t matter, says WP, if what you write is incomplete, or nonsense, or not worthy of the “Publish” button.
Yes, it does.
I respect Natalie Goldberg, but I’m not about to put my wild mind out for the public to view. I will display irony and self-deprecating humor, keep my tongue lodged in my cheek, and present myself as flippant, superficial, frivolous, shallow, and self-absorbed.* My thoughts, which are seldom pure and never simple, thank you Oscar Wilde, plumb a depth those who read my blog and listen to me talk cannot imagine. And I don’t share.
That’s one reason I’ve cut down on Facebooking: It’s too easy to record what I think.
This free write has gone on for an hour and will go on until the manager of the book store tells me my car is about to be towed for violating the three-hour limit on parking if I don’t make myself stop.
To introduce today’s prompt, WP quotes Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, on what all writers face:
You write because you have an idea in your mind that feels so genuine, so important, so true. And yet, by the time this idea passes through the different filters of your mind, and into your hand, and onto the page or computer screen — it becomes distorted, and it’s been diminished. The writing you end up with is an approximation, if you’re lucky, of whatever it was you really wanted to say.
– Author Khaled Hosseini, “How to Write,” the Atlantic
Irish Murdoch expressed a similar idea in fewer words: Every novel is the wreck of a perfect idea.
What jumps out at me is this: Most of life is a wreck of a perfect idea. And we publish it anyway.
There: I’ve accessed a pure thought and idea of my wild mind.
Well. It’s been drummed into me that an essay must have a conclusion. The previous paragraph, although an abrupt ending, is close enough. I’ll leave this and work for a while on the *I#%+)(^! rough draft of the novel, which is what I’ve been avoiding for the past three-plus hours.
Thanks, WP, for supporting procrastination.
*****
*I am self-absorbed.
Note: This place isn’t busy and the manager hasn’t said anything, so I assume my car is where I left it.
Note: With all respect to Mr. Hosseini, who writes beautiful books, I had no idea to express when I began writing this. I wrote it because WP told me to.
All Over Your Leg
“That cat will write her autograph all over your leg if you let her.” ~ Samuel L. Clemens
– from memoirs of Clemens’ secretary Mary Howden which were published in New York Herald, December 13, 1925
It is 3:30 a.m. I stayed up working on a website for a friend. Then I replied to some emails. Then I wrote several more emails to the same people, as if I thought they were awake and waiting for them. In fact, one of them was awake, and she read my email and replied, so I replied to her.
Then I checked out a page of Shakespearean insults. Earlier in the evening I had found a blog with a title very like the one at the top of this page, so it’s obvious I need a new one–the fact that I’m down to a cow as header is another clue things here are wearing thin; I love cows, but I don’t consider them header material–and before I can do anything else, I must have a title, and the title must be literary. And since Lewis Carroll is pretty well taken up, I turned to Shakespeare. Why I chose insults, I don’t know, except that a while back I found a perfect title there–Guts and Midriff. It’s from Henry IV Part I: Act 3, Scene 3. The entire quotation goes this way:
There’s no room for faith, truth, nor honesty in this bosom of thine. It is all filled up with guts and midriff.
For vivid imagery, there’s no one better than Shakespeare.
Except for Mark Twain. Finding no insult that seemed appropriate, I turned to a site of Twain quotations and, of course, ended up on the cat page. Twain liked cats. A lot. And his family had a passel of them. Put Mark Twain and cats together, and I’ll read quotations all night without a thought of a blog title.
I think my love of Twain comes from growing up among men who talked like Twain wrote. My father and his Woodward uncles, one of whom lived next door, had the same–I don’t know what, but they had it. If a stenographer had followed them around, the transcripts would have had a lot of Huck Finn in them. When Huck says that Pap has a couple of his toes leaking out the front end of his boot–I can hear my dad saying it. One of my greatest regrets is that the last time he and his three brothers were together, I sat there for three or four hours listening to them remember but didn’t get up and go into the next room for the tape recorder. Well, spilt milk.
Anyway, in my moseying through the Twain and cats page, I discovered the quotation at the first of this post–not something Twain wrote, but something he said to his secretary about the cat that was shredding her dress–and thought it would make a decent post. But when I got it on the page, it looked so small all by itself, so I decided to add a few words of my own. And now I have, so I without further ado, I shall sign off.
Excelsior! – Yeah, Right
(Excelsior: a Latin word meaning loftier,
used in English as an interjection meaning Ever upward)
used in English as an interjection meaning Ever upward)
***
The shades of night were falling fast,
As through an Alpine village passed
A youth, who bore, ‘mid snow and ice,
A banner with the strange device,
Excelsior!
His brow was sad; his eye beneath,
Flashed like a falchion from its sheath,
And like a silver clarion rung
The accents of that unknown tongue,
Excelsior!
“Try not the Pass!” the old man said;
“Dark lowers the tempest overhead,
The roaring torrent is deep and wide!”
And loud that clarion voice replied,
Excelsior!
In happy homes he saw the light
Of household fires gleam warm and bright;
Above, the spectral glaciers shone,
And from his lips escaped a groan,
Excelsior!
“Oh stay,” the maiden said, “and rest
Thy weary head upon this breast! “
A tear stood in his bright blue eye,
But still he answered, with a sigh,
Excelsior!
***
A traveller, by the faithful hound,
Half-buried in the snow was found,
Still grasping in his hand of ice
That banner with the strange device,
Excelsior!
There in the twilight cold and gray,
Lifeless, but beautiful, he lay,
And from the sky, serene and far,
A voice fell like a falling star,
Excelsior!
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
***
I should have posted a list of resolutions on January 1.
I should have said, In 2014, I will write a blog post every day and write one short story a month and submit it for publication and finish my novel and query agents and sign with one and impress a publisher so much that he will offer a 6-book contract and an enormous advance to publish the novel and will pay for a coast-to-coast book tour and I will graciously accept and while waiting for the book tour I will lose 800 pounds and finish my second novel and I will reduce clutter and I will run a marathon and I will read Moby Dick and all of Henry James’ novels and I will learn to cook and will put a tasty and nutritious dinner on the table every night and I will read a book a week and will practice the piano and take voice lessons and a conversational Spanish class and I will, by January 1, 2015, be such a paragon of perfection that I will never have to make another New Year’s resolution ever again.
But all this week, I’ve been in a beastly mood, just waiting for some unsuspecting person to do something nice so I could switch on my evil eye, and that feeling was compounded when Ernest ate six inches of ribbon that was hanging from David’s birthday balloon, which we didn’t think he could reach but were we ever wrong, and then I stayed up two nights watching him for symptoms before delivering him to the emergency clinic Wednesday night and at dawn Thursday picked him up and delivered him to his regular doctor, who this afternoon said so far he seemed okay and probably just needed to come home and move around and relax because he’d been sort of frozen up, not because he was scared but because he didn’t like the people there, from which description I gather he was in a beastly mood, too.
To make a long post short, I don’t want to write about resolutions, much less make them, and even worse, I don’t want to spend 2014 striving to become a better and more productive person.
I want to recline in a vat of chocolate.
Anyway, to show I’m still a good person even though I don’t want to be, I’ll share this post from Totsymae: 9 Rules on How to Be Fabulous in 2014.
Nobody knows more about being fabulous than Totsymae, and I’m not talking everyday, garden variety fabulous. (To wit: Rule 1. Carry breath mints.)
I’ll be back in a day or two and maybe then I’ll have something more edifying to impart.
Waiting for Poof!
Tomorrow morning, or, to be exact, later this morning, the nice man with the loud motor and all the hoses and the soap will arrive to clean our carpet.
There is nothing we need more. There is nothing I desire less.
Because before the nice man comes, I have to move all the living room furniture into the dining room, which is already filled with a table, chairs, a sideboard stuffed with china, and a stationary bike. Some of the furniture will spill into the kitchen. If I’m not careful, I won’t be able to get to the cabinet for a glass, the sink for water, or the refrigerator for whatever is in there.
Worse yet, before the nice man comes, I have to pick up everything else that is on the floor. The furniture is nothing. I’ll drag three chairs, two tables, and two lamps onto the tile and tell the nice man to work around the piano, the electronics, the couch, and possibly the bookcases, depending on how hard I want to work.
The tables are a bit of a challenge because I have to move their marble tops separately, and marble is heavy. One of the lamps is old, an oil lamp wired for electricity, that I’ve always loved. It’s a challenge, too, because I’m obsessed with its fragility. My mother bought it in Maryland in 1946. We coexisted peacefully for my first forty years, but since I inherited it twenty years ago, I’ve been afraid I would break it. Someday I’ll post a picture of it, but first I have to remove the cobwebs. In case of breakage, I’m counting on cobwebs to hold the shards together.
But, as I said, all those things are really nothing. David will help. He’s home for Columbus’ Day. He might even be looking forward to the experience. He was furloughed–or, as I prefer to call it, shut down–two weeks ago. He doesn’t appear to be growing restive, but cooking breakfast every day is bound to get boring. Variety is a good thing.
The big deal is that I have to pick up all the books and papers previously stacked and now collapsed all around my chair. Books I need to read, books I have read but need to read again, books that were on shelves until I had the impulse to put them where I could reach them. Notebooks of every shape and size and color, a different one for each purpose, and all now multipurpose because I can never find the right one when I need it. Paper paper paper comprising manuscripts of, it seems, everything I’ve ever written. And other stuff. I suspect there’s more other stuff than anything else. I expect to find several items already given up for lost. Especially another pair of socks. They have to be around here somewhere.
Remember the piece Fancy Fairchild posted on the 15 Minutes of Fame blog, about the cloth-covered boxes stacked behind her couch that she’s trying to pass off as an end table? I have some of those too. But without the cloth or the boxes.
So why, you ask, am I writing about getting ready for the carpet cleaner when I should be getting ready.
Denial, that’s why. Just plain denial. If I look at the monitor rather than at the–stuff–it might tippy-toe over to the kitchen all by itself. It might disappear. Vanish. Atomize. Poof!
Stranger things have happened.
***
The dining room pictured above is not mine, more’s the pity.
The Eight Suggestions for 2013
Yesterday I said I would post my Seven Suggestions for 2013. Copying them, I found there were eight.
Here it is, the unalliterative but expanded version of The Eight Suggestions.
1) Finish the @%%&$@!% novel (aka either fall in love with it again or chuck it);
2) follow through on the Sacred Writing Time Pledge ) to write one hour a day;
3) write a daily blog post, and if that becomes too difficult, reduce to three posts per week;
4) participate in at least one A Round of Words in 80 Days challenge, which is no problem for anyone who sets out suggestions and then blogs at least once a week;
5) fix up an office in the spare room;
6) go to bed before midnight so the rest of this list has a chance of being done;
7) keep a timesheet;
8) trim this list to #s 1, 2, and 5 if necessary; do some calculations and acknowledge that #s 1-6 won’t be a burden if the person doing them just gets up and DOES them.
Amen.
***
For the first week of A Round of Words for 80 Days, I’ll focus on Suggestion #2.
2012: The Year Unreviewed
Every week, I meet a friend for coffee at a shop near my house. Every week, she says, “What have you been doing?”
Every week, I pause and say, “I can’t remember.”
Then I ask her the same question and she can’t remember what she did either.
We’ve agreed not to worry about our mutual amnesia. It doesn’t prevent us from conversing for the next two or three hours. And, all things considered, it isn’t surprising that nothing outstanding springs to mind. We have rich internal lives, but otherwise, our days do tend to swamp together once they’re past.
Oops. I just stopped and re-read the previous paragraph and realized it could herald the start of a downhill slide straight into a maudlin mire. Sort of like an inverse fiscal cliff.
But no. Here’s what I’m getting at: I intended to look back on 2012, capture its high points, before moving on. But suddenly my mind is a blank.
I didn’t keep a journal. The closest thing I have to a record of the year is this blog, and the problem there is–well, you know how I exaggerate. And you might have noticed I was absent for long stretches; that leaves some big holes in the narrative. I could elaborate, but I’ll say simply that I was not lying on the beach at Cannes, no was I in a mountain cabin finishing the Great American Novel. More’s the pity.
I’ll also say a sincere Thank you to those who kept on visiting here when I was neither reading nor writing, and also when I was writing but not answering mail. As Polly Pepper would say, you are all bricks.
(Fifty years after meeting Polly Pepper [my mother read Phronsie Pepper to me when I had the chickenpox and the measles in rapid succession], I (tonight) looked up you’re a brick and discovered it started, possibly, with King Lycurgus of Sparta describing his soldiers. It’s amazing what one can find to distract one from one’s purpose.)
This post is beginning to sound like one of those afternoons at the coffee shop, so I will end it. The waiters tolerate meandering because the shop is nearly empty, and because upon leaving we tip well. I don’t expect readers, who receive no gratuity at all, to mosey along for what’s likely to be a dead end.
So. I wish you a happy, healthy 2013.
Talk to you next year.
***
P.S. Regarding the photo above. That is exactly what I look like when I’m trying to remember what I did last week. Right down to the big black eyes, long black lashes, and dimpled elbow.
The Solstice
I am not hiding. I’m just a tiny bit snowed under, a major accomplishment in Texas, especially right after the summer solstice.
ROW80, AMW, Dorothy, & Tallulah
I owe A Round of Words in 80 Days (ROW80) another Wednesday check-in. Fortunately, I finally have something significant to report.
My original goals were to sleep (get to bed before midnight, I believe); eat well (get off the white stuff, processed foods, added salt, sweeteners); and show up at critique meetings with something to be critiqued (in other words, write).
Before I discuss progress, I’ll note that Austin Mystery Writers (AMW) is alive and well. Several members have been on hiatus, dealing with other projects (such as work), another can’t attend regularly (again, work), and this week our Grand Pooh-Bah moved a hundred miles to the north. Only two non-Pooh Bahs remained to stay the course, and we considered four eyes insufficient to ferret out the flaws in our respective manuscripts.
Last night, however, concern vanished. Two new members joined us, a third has promised to drop in next week, and two others have listed themselves as maybes.
Being in a critique has been a good experience for me. In addition to ideas and advice, I’ve received encouragement and support for my writing and for my personal life. My partners have helped me over some rough spots in the past couple of years.
I’ve also learned a lot. Since we’ve been together, one partner has published a novel and has more in line for publication. Two others have completed manuscripts. While in one sense I’ve been stalled–scrambling down bunny trails, trying to get my plot under control–I’ve learned about the business of writing.
As to my own WIP: Pieces continue to fall into place. Listening to a presentation at the Austin Sisters in Crime meeting last Sunday, I had a brainstorm–a detail that would make a central character’s motivation much more credible. I flipped to the next page in my notebook and scribbled it down. I’ve also had another idea about reframing the novel to update it a bit. When I realized that Molly hadn’t once, in nearly three hundred pages, gone online, I pulled out Chapter One and inserted Internet.
Today I retyped Chapter One. The experts say not to do that–especially considering the number of times I’ve rewritten it, trying to get the foundation right–but I’m not revising so much as remembering. It’s been through many incarnations, and typing requires me to read more closely than I would if only my eyes were involved. I’ll continue this process for three or four more chapters, inserting new segments where appropriate (I hope!). Projected changes add originality. They give Audrey Ann, a minor character, more opportunity for mischief-making. Audrey Ann is a hoot, and I look forward to spending more time with her.
(One of my critique partners suggested Audrey Ann would make a good victim, but she’s too much fun to kill. Very much like my first intended victim, whom I couldn’t bring myself to knock off. If this becomes a trend, I’m in big trouble.)
I’ve added a progress meter to the sidebar on the left. Five percent represents progress on the current draft–in other words, what I retyped today. I’ve been working on this project, and talking and writing about it, for a long time. I don’t want to give the impression that I’ve eked out just four thousand words.
Now, as to my plan for eating real food: Sometimes I have and sometimes I haven’t. I have, however, dropped nineteen pounds since the first of the year, so I claim at least modified success.
(Who am I trying to kid? I rock.)
Regarding sleep: It’s after 1:00 a.m. No excuses.
One last thing about Austin Mystery Writers: When the other left-behind critique partner mentioned we might need to put several of the coffee shop’s tables together to handle the potentially large turnout, it occurred to me that if we works things right, AMW could become the Austin equivalent of the Algonquin Hotel’s Round Table. A heady thought. Critique partner said I could be Dorothy Parker. She wants to be Tallulah Bankhead. I wish I could be the glamorous one, but with my evil tongue, Dorothy P. is right down my alley. More’s the pity. I’ll try to be nice.
*****
Related Articles
- Bad Sleep Leads To Unhealthy Food Choices (medicalnewstoday.com)
- What Does This Picture Mean To You? (kiefinsanity.wordpress.com)
- How The Brain Becomes Impaired By Sleep Deprivation, Leading To Improper Food Choices (medicalnewstoday.com)
- Food Processing (eatfittolive.com)
- Americans Spending Less Money On Groceries, But Greater Share Of It On Processed Food (huffingtonpost.com)
- Want to lose weight? Sleep on it (lfpress.com)
- Graphic! Internal digestion process on video (biosil.wordpress.com)
Grappling with King Charles’ Head
I have been–to use a term I learned from fellow blogger Kate Shrewsday–in a funk hole.
Recent events in the American political arena have had me biting my tongue and wearing mittens to keep from making an abject fool of myself on this blog.
Every time I started a post, I immediately thought of a number of men whose names I will not mention–yes, always men–and my chosen topic veered off the rails into an area I prefer not to traverse.
I felt like Mr. Dick, David Copperfield’s friend, whose attempts to complete his Memorial were repeatedly obstructed by the intrusion of King Charles’ Head.
Lacking Mr. Dick’s good sense, sweet temper, and ability to construct a kite from a laptop monitor, I went underground. Crawled under the porch. Played Bookworm for two or three weeks.
Bookworm is a good game. One evening I racked up 2,000,000 points before my library burned up. This is not a boast. It is a source of shame. But it kept me from posting.
I’ve also watched all the P. D. James mystery adaptations on Netflix, some of them twice. And all the episodes of Kingdom three or four times. I was so unhappy to learn Kingdom ran only three seasons. Here I am left hanging, wondering who Peter Kingdom really is.
But I believe my topic has once again taken off on its own.
The point is that you, Dear Reader, do not come here to read what I think of the current U. S. political scene, nor do you need to know about my obsessive-compulsive personality. Or my sharp tongue.
I prefer that you think of me as a kindly, marshmallowy creature, constitutionally incapable of an unrefined thought. Kind of like Jane Bennett.
And to that end, I found myself a funk hole and crawled in.
When I came out to test the waters, I wrote about cats, the subject least likely to attract King Charles’ Head.
Having passed that test, I now return to the fold.
Round #2 of A Round of Words in 80 Days begins this week. I flunked–if that’s possible–Round #1–but I’m willing to give it another try.
My Round #2 goal is to submit to my critique group every week. Period.
King Charles and the U. S. Congress can go fly a kite.
To All My Blogger Friends
Dear Blogger Bloggers,
For the past several weeks I have tried repeatedly to comment on your posts, but Blogger has repeatedly refused to accept my comments. Word verification is the hang-up: the letters I type never match the letters I’m told to type, no matter how many times I type them. And proof them.
I’m finished with waiting for the problem to fix itself. I’ll report it to Blogger. In the meantime, I’m sending harmonious vibrations your way.
Disgustedly* yours,
KW
*With Blogger, not with you.
Related Articles
- Word Verification (silverthoughts2.wordpress.com)
- Blog Problem, Help Please from The Rhetorical Gamer (morrisonmp.wordpress.com)
- Problems with Blogger word verification (christinelaennec.co.uk)
Image by Machine Elf 1735 (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
ROW80 1.2.12 Goals & Boiling a Frog
A friend says resolutions should be brief. Her resolution for 2012 is Move.
Ten years ago, when she was into metaphor, she adopted, Boil the frog slowly.
The former refers to being more physically active. The latter might be phrased, Make small, incremental changes.
I admire her artistry, but deplore her lack of clarity. They’re her resolutions, however. If they work for her, that’s all that matters.
A Round of Words in 80 Days #5 begins today. I was supposed to announce my goals January 1, but didn’t get around to it. Whether such tardiness portends good or ill remains to be seen. I’m pretty sure I’ll accomplish more than I did during ROW80 #4, when I met about 1% of what I’d set out to do. I offer no apologies for the lapse. I remember 2011 as one long series of lapses.
A medical professional, and my hero, once told me, “You can’t tell your hypothalamus what to do.” Unfortunately, my hypothalamus has no problem at all ordering me around.
Anyway, while good old HT and I are on speaking terms, I re-enter the challenge and state my goals:
1. Write about Molly at least 5 days a week.
2. See #1.
There it is. Simple. Measurable. Doable.
Concerning goals for the non-writing part of life, I haven’t made it beyond the one that’s topped every New Year’s list since I was fifteen. I’ll come up with something else before the end of the month. The process is complicated this year because I’ve gotten so many good ideas from other bloggers:
Ariana at Pearl’s Twirl introduced me to “The Anti-bucket List.” Those resolutions are no trouble at all to keep.
Totsymae helped me with both 2012 resolutions and my anti-bucket list in “Things You Should Admit to Yourself Before You Enter the New Year (or Positively Negative).” Totsymae knows what she’s talking about.
Kate Shrewsday, in “The Milestone Mirage,” reminded me that our small acts define us, and convinced me to write down my pebbles.
Pseu1’s Blog showed me how to record small stones and introduced me to River of Stones.
So. I’m off to tell ROW80 what I’ve decided.
And then I’ll visit Molly. She’s a delightful girl. If only she didn’t depend on me to choreograph her every move.
*
*
*
*
*
To see what other ROW80 participants are up to, click here.
“The saddest words…,” or, “Who cares?”
We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.—Somerset Maugham
After two days of letting A. A. Milne and Mark Twain do my thinking for me, I buckled down this evening and composed an essay about my experiences teaching high school English.
Actually, I wrote about half of a draft in which I said that all except three of my students hated writing, and that when I became a better teacher about a dozen showed slight enthusiasm for writing, and that after the library (to which I had fled in search of a job that would allow me to buy books with other people’s money) connected to the Internet and let students open e-mail accounts, those who had formerly resisted picking up a pen skipped lunch to park themselves at my computers and e-mail students sitting less than a foot away when they could have just turned their heads and spoken face-to-face.
Of course, I said that in shorter sentences, but a lot more of them.
I was planning to say that kids who’d been telling their composition teachers, “But I don’t have anything to say,” suddenly found plenty to say. I was going remark that the novelty of the technology contributed to the verbal onslaught. I was going to mention that the definite sense of aim, mode, and audience also promoted fluency.
I was going to expand the discussion from students with e-mail to adults with blogs. I was going to say that two weeks ago I joined the NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) network and, following its dictates, have posted on two blog sites every blessed day for thirteen days straight, even when I haven’t had anything worth saying.
I was going to say I’m running out of pictures of my cats, and there are only so many poses they’re willing to strike, and I’d prefer not be pigeonholed as a chronicler of cute.
I was going to say that more than 12,000 other people are blogging at NaBloPoMo–poetry, journals, photographs, devotionals, stories, recipes, a plethora of words, words, words. I was going to marvel at what appears to be a compulsion among people who, like my students (and I was going to admit I had once shared feeling), would once have found it difficult or foreign or unimaginable to put pen to paper.
I was going to wonder about this desire to create, to share, to vent, to communicate, to play, to do whatever we’re doing when we contribute to the sentences flooding cyberspace.
I was going to say that some people tat or make doilies or whittle, and we write.
Then I was going to draw a lesson, wise and well-phrased, from all the foregoing, and end with a nod to novelist Somerset Maugham, whose words precede mine on this page.
That’s what I said and what I was going to say.
Unfortunately, about three hundred words in, I touched an alien key and deleted everything except the HTML for font, and I couldn’t find the Undo icon because I’d composed on a new blog I’d set up on a rival blog site and hadn’t read all the instructions and found out I’d have to undo with a keystroke rather than an icon.
So now, instead of referring to Maugham, I shall end by paraphrasing Blaise Pascal, Mark Twain, T. S. Eliot, and any others to whom the line has been attributed, and say that this post would have been shorter but I didn’t have time.*
*It would have had better sentence structure, too. But it’s a lot less pompous, ponderous, and moralistic in this who-cares version.
*****
Reposted from Whiskertips, July 23, 2009
*****
Image by Julitofranco (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
M. K. Waller 