Stories are life. Read some, write some, be some.

oneword.com again

05/10/2012 13:41:00

I wrote on the htp://www.oneword.com word of the day again today. I think it turned out well. I wrote:

These things that they do, I can’t understand them. They eat with their fingers, they take food from each others’ plates. I don’t think they know what napkins are for. I just do my best to eat, to have enough peace to digest, but it’s difficult, living with such primitives. Children aren’t what I thought they’d be.

The Path

03/28/2012 09:06:00

The path is long and climbs

Through woods I hate to see.

And yet I go there constantly,

Symptom of who I hate to be.

In slow-motion I walk along

Knowing where the thing will lead.

The walking is more tolerable

Than not walking it would be.

I'm isolated on this path,

Though others have been here.

I search the path for company,

A response that I will never see.

Walking on this path

Provides me time to think.

And yet the sounds of it

Prevent all thought and peace.

I climb this lonely path of mine,

Symptom of who I hate to be.

My dad did this before me,

This familial idiocy.

****************

I wrote this poem from a prompt on pw.org, the Web site of Poets & Writers. I opened a book at random, then chose a word from the page, then did it 9 more times and wrote 10 couplets, each containing one of the words. The book I picked without seeing the title was Migraine, by Oliver Sacks. I am not sure what the poem is about, but my dad and I both get migraines, so that might have been in the back of my mind. Let me know what you think.

Spring fever, old woman version

03/22/2012 13:45:00

Not that I'm old! I'm not very old. But my back and my knees are old, and my get up and go got up and went. Inside, I'm still 17.

But spring is going to come again, I know it by the calendar, and the lengthening of days. I know it by the sunshine that heats up the area by the patio door, even though when I open that door and step outisde to enjoy the sunshine, I still wish for at least a sweater. There was snow on the ground again this morning. But spring will come.

And yesterday I did the thing that I sometimes do in the spring--I ordered seeds. Not as many as I often do, in fits of optimism. Not as many as I did even a few years ago when I first put in the raised beds at my former house. Not that many.

But when I came home from town Tuesday I spotted the cute little fiber cups for starting seeds in the house and I just thought that I wanted to get some things going. Some vegetable things. Some flower things. Some spring things.

And so I will. I ordered a type of tomato that's supposed to be a short-season grower and very popular in the Northwest, Mountain Magic. I've forgotten now. And some seedless Diva cucumbers. And winter squash of a variety that supposed to be able to germinate in cold mud--we seem to have an abundance of that around here--a squash called Sweet Meat Oregon Homestead. And a zucchini to make me progressively popular, and then unpopular with the neighbors. And a collection of pretty veggies and flowers--chard and nasturtiums and such--to grow in one of the cool bottom-watering containers that my son made for me last year (the ones he made are larger than in the link, made from the big Rubbermaid tubs we used to bring compost material home in). I got Shirley poppy seeds to plant in my yard and to share. I had them in my former yard, and loved them. I'm going to have them here, too. Not sure where I'll put the blue daisies or some of the other stuff I ordered.

I got most of my seeds from Nichols Garden Nursery, from whom my mom bought seeds when I was a kid, and I got three kinds from an ebay seller who has top ratings, called smartseeds, who specializes in novelty seeds.

I didn't buy a whole lot, but more than I can probably keep up with. But who cares? It's part of spring fever, and I am going to do my part, no matter how small it might turn out to be, to make the neighborhood both prettier and more edible.

What did you do about him?

03/14/2012 16:38:00

I've been going to a class called Practice, Practice, Practice at ArtEast in Issaquah, Just for fun, I'm going to post a poetic piece I wrote from a prompt we got in class that only said, "If we ran into each other one day, what would you ask me?" I immediately pictured a couple of high school friends who hadn't talked in years.

* * *

Are you still, did you ever,

Oh how to say it?

What about him? What did you do about him?

Oh, I know it's none of my business, but I was there, too.

I saw him. I loved him.

He was the finest thing I ever saw.

He sang like an angel, he danced like a dream.

He looked at all of us, but you most of all.

I remember when we went to the beach.

Your secret recipe for improving the beans:

Chopped green onions, mustard and brown sugar.

But sand was the main ingredient when he scuffed up to the fire.

Everyone laughed.

You tried to be mad.

But I saw your eyes.

You would have forgiven him anything.

Anything at all.

So did you? Did you have to?

Did he hurt you? Or did he love you?

Or did you give him a chance?

I wonder these things because I loved him, too.

He was the finest thing I ever saw.

So tell me, what did you do about him?

Did you give him a chance to love you or hurt you?

Because a chance to do one is the chance to do either.

What did you do about him?

On the other side of NaNoWriMo

12/28/2011 10:52:00

I made it through NaNoWriMo successfully -- and got what I think will be a pretty god story out of it. Its working title is Piper's Private Writing School. Probably that will be its final title, too. As my two younger children were thinking of participating in it in the beginning, they are featured pretty much as-is as far as personality goes. That will need to change in the final. I may make them a little bit younger, and change their names. I have the story out to a few readers to critique, though it is in first-draft speed demon NaNoWriMo format. Two of them have read it all the way through and given me some good feedback.

I am back to working on Tempo, the 2010 Nanovel. I will need to do some trimming on it. I suspect I have a few soapboxes I need to get down from, trimming of extraneous crap, intensification of viscerality, consequences that need to occur, conflict that needs ratcheting. You know. The usual.

NaNoWriMo 2011 -- day 1!

11/01/2011 12:58:00

Today is the first day of NaNoWriMo 2011! This is the sixth year in a row that I've participated. I also began it in 2003, but I didn't get very far. I don't remember what my story that year was going to be. I do remember the other years.

2006 was an unnamed SF piece where deaf and hard-of-hearing people saved the world from alien domination.

2007 was Her Thirty Percent, a charming love triangle set in a gym where I let the woman keep both lovers.

2008 was Three Knights in Florida, a game-based tale where three facebook friends met in person for the first time and played a tournament of their own devising and faced a hurricane.

2009 was Adjusting the Shade, a family story about a grandfather and granddaughter pair of chiropractors and a ghost.

2010 is Tempo, the one I'm still writing, about a bipolar violinist recovering from the loss of her husband with the help of a psychiatrist who thinks he's a samurai.

This year I have only a rough idea of what I want to do -- it features a delusional main character -- and a beginning I thought was pretty cool. Now that I'm a bit over 1000 words into it, I am not so sure. I am boring myself! This is not a terrible outcome, as it's not an outcome yet. I do plan to do some good writing and fun exploring.

I also plan to continue to work on Tempo, last year's Nanovel, as it is not quite finished. Yes, I won (meaning I got my 50,000 words done) but no, the story wasn't finished. It turned out to be a lot bigger than I had planned on writing. Last night I roughed in some more story skeleton and notes on what I wanted the characters to have happen. I edited over the last couple of days, too, after leaving it mostly alone for a month.

And speaking of leaving things alone! I have stopped playing Dragons of Atlantis! It was a big deal to me, to be able to do taht, as the game had me thoroughly sucked in. It was fun, and social, but I tend to be rather obvsessive and get all absorbed in games and don't get anything else done. I've always been that way, though before computers came into my life it was reading or writing that I usually got absorbed in.

So. My story this year will be fun, eventually, even if I have to tweak the concept a few more times. Or even a lot more times.

See you on the other side!

What I've really been doing

09/29/2011 12:19:00

I might as well admit it.

What I've really been doing for the last year is playing Dragons of Atlantis on facebook.

Naturally, I'm still doing other things, too, but I've been playing Dragons of Atlantis a whole lot.

It's a fun game created by Wonderhill, which has been acquired by Kabam, the people who also made Kingdoms of Camelot and Edgeworld. There are people to talk to, a city and outposts and an army to build--which includes several kinds of dragons and mythical beasties--alliances to join or to oppose.

The graphics are great, though it has no animation other than outpost fires and moving dragons in your city and outposts. They move around, and they look like crap when they're injured. I was happy when fires were added to the map. It's so pretty when you light up an opponent's outpost. This is often referred to in world chat as a barbecue, and people will be asking if anyone has marshmallows (though most of them misspell it "marshmellows," to my annoyance). The fires don't seem as pretty when they are in your own outpost. Peculiar.

Dragons of Atlantis is an MMORPG, and very successful, too, so I'm not the only person who's hopelessly hooked on it. Some people are hooked a lot worse than I am. I still manage to eat once in a while and see real humans from time to time, and I don't spend a lot of money on the game. (You don't have to spend any money at all to play it, but you can.) Some people spend hundreds, and their humongous armies reflect that. There are always things to do in this game, and there are always a lot of other people online playing it. Of course if they're not online, you can always go and visit and plunder their cities.

Unless they're in an alliance that is friendly with your alliance.

Did I mention alliances? There's chat, world chat and alliance chat. Because it's glitchy and because you can only chat with your specific alliance members in it (as opposed to, say, Noble Fools II and III as well as your own Noble Fools) and can't monitor world chat at the same time, no one ever uses alliance chat anymore, they just make facebook groups and chat in them instead.

Which means that people know each others' names and then they get to be friends in real life. Almost. Sort of. Some of the time.

When you start out in the game, you have to choose a name. Do it carefully, as it'll cost a lot to change it later. The game *is* free to play, but some things you can only get by buying rubies, the game currency. Choosing a name is difficult now that so many people are playing it, as a lot of great names have already been taken. I have taken a couple of them myself, as I play in several realms.

Each realm (server) is a unique game world even though the map looks exactly the same. You can have built up a fantastic city in some realm, and have millions upon millions of resources, but if you begin to play in a new realm--and they are adding more of them all the time--then you have to start all over.

Ok. So you start playing by building your city. If you follow the little quests that are given to you, then that's one way to build. There are others. You really don't need to do everything the quests suggest. Like a theater to keep your happiness up? Once you have enough gold rolling in from theft you don't need your people to be happy, as you won't need to tax them, which is the only thing that makes them unhappy. Silly people don't care if you draft their asses into your armies, and you need to do that on a regular basis.

The critical thing to remember when you are building is that this is a war game. So make sure you have room for lots of garrisons in your city and lots of training camps in your outposts.

If you want to read how to do the game, then go to the Dragonomicon. It's a good guide to all things Dragons of Atlantis.

Game on.

Work to goals in less than thirty seconds

06/14/2011 08:00:00

#trust30

Remember this? I wrote a little bit the first two days of the challenge that's supposedly based on Ralph Waldo Emerson's book, Self Reliance.

I have not liked the prompts, so I haven't been writing to them. They aren't Emersonian enough for me. Each author has a quote from the book, then they go off on their own tangent from there. A lot of them talk aobut goals, a modern popular concept.

Today's prompt is this:

"One Thing by Colin Wright

Do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Take a moment, step back from your concerns, and focus on one thing: You have one life to achieve everything you’ve ever wanted. Sounds simple, but when you really focus on it, let it seep into your consciousness, you realize you only have about 100 years to get every single thing you’ve ever wanted to do. No second chances. This is your only shot. Suddenly, this means you should have started yesterday. No more waiting for permission or resources to start. Today is the day you make the rest of your life happen. Write down one thing you’ve always wanted to do and how you will achieve that goal. Don’t be afraid to be very specific in how you’ll achieve it: once you start achieving, your goals will get bigger and your capability to meet them will grow.

(Author: Colin Wright)"

It goes from work to goals in less than thirty seconds.

Buzz words, be gone.

Course correction

06/01/2011 07:59:00

Today's prompt for #trust30

Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. The force of character is cumulative. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

If ‘the voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tracks,’ then it is more genuine to be present today than to recount yesterdays. How would you describe today using only one sentence? Tell today’s sentence to one other person. Repeat each day.

(Author: Liz Danzico)

* * *

A course correction is underway today, as I've drifted too far to the south and need to steer by the stars.

The Lazy Girl

05/31/2011 15:03:00

I have just signed up for #Trust30, an online initiative and 30-day writing challenge via The Domino Project, inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s book, Self-Reliance. Today is the first day of the challenge. The prompt and my response are below. If you're interested in joining in, go tohttp://ralphwaldoemerson.me/

* * *

We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

You just discovered you have fifteen minutes to live.

1. Set a timer for fifteen minutes.
2. Write the story that has to be written.

(Author: Gwen Bell)

* * *

Oh, this scares me so much! What story do I have to tell that’s worth the last fifteen minutes of my life? I don’t think there is one—not a single story, not a particular story. I have things to say to people, people who loved me, people who always will. People I loved, and people I should have loved but didn’t. I guess I'll write the biography of a lazy girl.

* * *

There once was a girl who was lazy. All she wanted to do was as little as possible. She had a lot of stomachaches, though the doctor never could see anything wrong with her. But that was no excuse. She was lazy and a dreamer and a reader, and school, though she said she liked it, wasn’t challenging, just stressful. She never understood why others struggled so with the concepts, and thought that there must be more to what was being taught than she could see. This filled her with anxiety, and she often made jokes to cover her fears and to ease her boredom.

When she wasn't at school, she was always in the house, reading. When her mother became annoyed with her hanging around one summer day, she said, "Get out of here! Go outside and play like other kids!"

The lazy girl shrugged and ran upstairs, theoretically to change into play clothes. She put on the shorts with the biggest pockets she could find, then slipped the smallest book she could find into one of the pockets. Thus armed she ran outside and climbed the cherry tree and settled on a large branch and read until she heard her mother calling them all to dinner.

She made friends with another girl who like stories better than anything else. Together they walked during recess, their heads bent together, talking about princesses and dragons and scary things that might happen in the dark. When they were in the fifth grade they wrote stories about robots. Those two girls lost track of one another, but then thirty years later the lazy girl, now a woman, found her old friend. Both of them were writers.

When the lazy girl went to junior high she found that humor was a great reliever of stress and boredom and became the class clown. In classes where a class clown was already in residence, she became the class clown’s assistant. This is a role she continued through her school years and her stories were usually filled with fun, too.

And now the lazy girl is a woman at the end of her life, always having done as little as possible, except where she couldn’t help it, when there was no one else available to do the work, or when the stories had to come out. She wishes that she could have back all the hours she spent playing Sims and spider and free cell and Evony and Hatchlings and all that other stuff. She doesn’t regret time spent reading books, though. Those made her think, and made her more interesting, so that she was able to give stories of her own to the world. If she had that wasted time back, she would use it wisely, spreading joy to all the world through stories.

Or so she thinks. I know this lazy woman, and am sure that she’d squander it all over again.

But some of her stories touched people. She knows from letters, even though she wasn’t worthy of the praises strangers gave to her. She was only doing as little as possible, writing down the stories that had to come out. One classmate, as she began a critique of the lazy woman’s story, said it made her cry because it sounded so much like the lazy woman. Others said that she wrote only warm, fuzzy, funny stories. She tried to break away from that, but she’s funny and fluffy. Fluff is all there is to her, the lazy creature.

But she didn’t pretend to be what she wasn’t, most of the time, unless she was also pretending to herself. And all that she said and wrote contained bits of truth. For example, there was the time she told each of her three children privately that they were her favorite. Later they compared notes and were mad at her for the joke. But she hadn’t lied to any of them.