This computer has a bug. The keyboard will decide to stick on a key
It’s excited.
Maybe i am too!
I am excited about the world at large becoming aquainted with my new book.
And with my old book.
And my not-yet-released-but-even-older book.
The world seems freindlier.
Maybe that’s why I’m feeling like opening up.
Hello again, World
The weather has been kind to us this summer. Not too hot. But around here, in desert country, you never know when the hot will kick in.
It was hot this week. It seems cooler today.
I hope it will be cooler today.
I really need to take the daughter on a bike ride. Every night she asked for it.
BICYCOO!
I suspect that is a ploy to get out of going to bed. But…she is asking for it. And i have that nice little baby seat on the back of my bike. I ~want~ to give her a bike ride.
I will try to do it if I remember.
Lord Give me strength!
My job has a lot to do with synchronicity.
What i mean by that is, things happening at basically the same time. I work in telecommunications, and this is a concept most people are very familiar with.
In a phone call, both people have to be there at the same time. Not the same place, but the same time.
A face to face, also known as f2f, has to be at the same place and the same time. The nerdword for the same place is co-location, sometimes called co-lo.
A phone call doesnt’ need the same place, as long as there is technology in place that connect the two people. Cell towers, cell phones, regular wired phone equipment, SOMETHING that allows people to be far away but still talk at the same time.
But they both have to be ther at the same time
SYNCHRONICITY
then again, there are ways of talking that don’t require synchronicity. Remember letters? Tools in the form of paper and ink, a delivery mechanism, the education background to READ, letters allow asynchronous communication.
Email uses different tools, but also allows for asynchronous communication.
To step away from nerddom for a moment, there are things in life that require synchronicity and others that don’t.
Some moments don’t come back.
But some moments will come if you wait.
And you just have to wait.
Stayed up way too late tonight with some old friends. We are rekindling a writer’s group.
There is little in life so precious as a good writer’s group. And this is a good writer’s group.
Ironically, we spoke very little about our writing tonight. We didn’t talk about our writing at ALL last meeting. Nevertheless, it was essential to the writing process that we do this.
See, just coming together and listening and talking with one another made me feel so much more ready to be creative.
To misquote:
If a writer writes alone in the woods, and nobody hears it, did it make a noise?
If I think about sitting down to put word to screen, and I do not have confidence that anyone besides myself gives a damn–I will most likely not sit down to put word to screen.
I have ideas and thought that I *think* about capturing and crafting.
But I don’t do it.
HOWEVER! My group got together to listen and to talk to one another. We were saying to one another ‘Yes! That is worth thinking about! Yes, you did phrase that cleverly! You do have a gift to share with us-with the world.’
We were cherishing one another.
It takes effort to write. To write ANYTHING, be it an opus magnum or a grocery list.
If I don’t value what I want to write, I lose it. All the ideas in the world are nothing to the lost ideas of the world.
It’s worth the effort
There seems to be a direct relationship between how tired I am and how irritated i get when Chris does not get up FIRST to take care of our daughter when she is noisily awake in the nighttime.
SOME days, though, I dont’ mind.
I wish I could make those days most days.
he taught her how to spin straw into gold, you know.
I myself have no idea how to spin. I saw someone do it once on a school field trip. THey had wool, a puff of it, and they used a spinning wheel to make it into a thred. The puff of fibers was wound into a string and then the string was wound around a spindle. They loaded it onto a loom and made very rough-looking cloth out of it.
But for that girl, they demanded she spin straw-flax probably because that is what you make linen out of-into gold.
She didn’t know how. I didn’t know how either. I would have no idea.
But the king left her alone in a room with straw and said DO IT!
she had a visitor. Ruplestiltskin, though she didn’t know his name yet.
He showed her how.
and in the end, he taught her how to get a prince for a husband.
except he demanded more than he had a right to. He demanded her firstborn
She was clever enough to best him at his challenge and figure out his name
so ther she was, queen and mother and someone who knew how to spin gold.
She was never asked to spin gold again. I wonder if she spun it anyway?
Hard to say. Because her new family had put her in that unfair position.
I thinkshe spun the gold on her own. I think she didn’t tell anyone, but she spun the straw into gold in between when she had the timeleft over after queen and mother duties were done.
Because you never know when you might need some gold.
I hope so. I am pretty sure.
I think that I am safe. There are things out there that can get me, I suppose. But I have to believe that I am strong enough to sustain myself even if I am hurt.
That will have to do.
I had good reasons. Mostly to protect myself. But I have decided that I don’t want to live in a world where I can’t blog. So I’m not going to publicize this too much. I’ve always been circumspect about what I post here.
But I”ve missed this blog every day i haven’t had it up. I’m putting it up again.
Regardless. I stand by my words.
I’m not sure if I will still keep the weekly wonder. I have a few followers, but it hasn’t exactly gone viral. I’m just one women, with her thoughts.
Well.
Hello World.
Long ago, when I was making friends with a fabulous intelligent interesting woman—a bit older than me—I was disappointed to learn that she preferred to read mystery books. At that time, I felt that mystery books were inferior genre fiction. A reader knew exactly what to expect from a book like that. Where was the challenge and pleasure in it?
She must have seen my disappointment, because she quickly explained “I like to see the bad guys get caught and good triumph in the end.”
I didn’t understand it then, but I think I get it now.
Last year, I had a bad run of my usual literary fiction choices. Wonderful book, wonderful writing, but three in a row dealt with suicide. After the second book, I was asking myself and the universe, “Really?! Must writers be so dark? There is nothing wrong with happy and victorious, is there?”
Then the third book with a suicide attempt happened. At this point, it was fool me THREE times shame on me. I was not going to read another book without a guarantee that no one was going to kill themselves. Enough was enough, already! But what sort of book was for sure not going to be suicide free?
Romance novel? One couldn’t be sure.
Mystery? Definitely not.
Science Fiction? Please. The dystopia of sci-fi might not only have people killing themselves, I might want to kill myself at the end of their bleakness.
Then I knew:
FANTASY
I could be very sure that if anyone offed themselves in a fantasy story, that person would deserve it. Fantasy is all about adventurous brave heroes. Struggle? Danger? Heroes and evil villains? Check and CHECK.
The brave would prevail! The bad guy would be at the very least badly thwarted, if not outright overthrown.
Yes, that would do.
The internet and friends gave me some very good recommendations, and I dove head first into the life-affirming world of fantasy genre fiction.
I finally got what my friend meant. Sometimes, you just need that one thing from a story. That thing that tells you it’s going to be okay and the world is alright on the whole, even when your world is off-kilter.
My proffessors’ Guilt List will be there. When I’m ready to go back to the ‘good’ books, I can find them. But right now, when things just seem more and more depressing in the world, I’ll follow the hero and believe in whatever magic they are using up until the bedside lamp turns out. Sweet dreams for me.
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