Trolls & Elves

Posted on 12/13/2017 by chick

Heard around the house:

One man’s troll is another man’s elf.

Somehow I doubt Santa would agree.

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Merlin, Wars, Yawn

Posted on 12/12/2017 by chick

Here is the review I wrote about a book that I read earlier this year.

The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart

Grade: B+

This is a first-person account of Merlin’s early years. In this telling, he is the illegitimate son of Ambrosius, who is Uther Pendragon’s brother. This makes Merlin the cousin of Arthur, who had not yet been born. Basically, Merlin figures out who he is and who his father is and then goes to live in a cave by himself. It’s slow-paced and deliberately skips all the action of multiple battles. To be honest, I found much of it boring.

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Revelations

Posted on 12/11/2017 by chick

I had an A-HA! moment while working on my novel this morning, just before my word processor ate the document that I was working on. Yes, the A-HA! moment was so powerful that it temporarily broke my computer. No worries, though. I hadn’t written much in that particular file yet, and revelations are hard to forget.

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All I Can Do Is Laugh

Posted on 12/09/2017 by chick

I have my own particular set of sayings that I use frequently. One of them is “make it snappy.” I use this saying on the kids when they’re slow to do whatever it is they’ve been told to do. But Marshall has decided to take the saying literally. If I tell him to “make it snappy,” he starts snapping his fingers and doing a little dance. Usually we’re in a rush, so I ought to get angry when he starts dancing instead of following my instructions. His snappy dance is just so hysterical that all I can do is laugh.

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I Should Know Better

Posted on 12/08/2017 by chick

I am old enough to know by now that if I hide something in an unusual spot and say to myself “Don’t forget that you put this here” it means I absolutely will forget and shouldn’t put it there. But I never seem to learn, and that is how I ended up spending a lot of precious time this week fruitlessly searching for my list of Advent gifts and printouts. I have now searched in all the likely spots several times, and most of the unlikely spots, too. No luck. Thank goodness I did some of the work on my computer and can at least reprint that part!

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Memento Mori

Posted on 12/06/2017 by chick

I went into my daughter’s room to get her up this morning. She was sitting on her bed, sorting through her Pokemon cards. Among the Pokemon tins was one smaller, different tin. She told me I could open it, so I did. Inside was a necklace with beads that spelled out the word MOM. Aw!

I said, “Oh, is this for me?”

“No,” she replied.

Huh. That was not the answer I had expected. “But is says `Mom’ on it. Are you sure it’s not for me?”

“It’s for me,” she said. “To remind me of you when you’re dead.”

She went on to explain that she doesn’t want me to die. It’s just that she wants to be able to remember me if I do. That sounds reasonable, and kind of sweet. I’m not planning to die any time soon, but it is nice to know that, if I do, there’s someone who wants to remember me.

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You Have to Look

Posted on 12/05/2017 by chick

The deadline for NaNoWriMo came and went. How did I fare? Not nearly as well as I had hoped. I stalled at about 17K. Worse yet, once I officially gave up on trying to reach 50K, I lost all motivation to write every day.

I’m trying to find motivation now. But, just as it would be hard to force oneself to stumble around in the dark without the guarantee of finding something valuable, so is it hard to write when you don’t know where the story is going. I’ve had to force myself to concentrate on small details and hope that it pushes me along somehow.

Sometimes it works. The other night I asked myself about how a certain fictional creation would smell. I got 900 words, a new character, and several potential plot directions out of that. I had gone into it without any hope or direction. It wasn’t fun. It was difficult.

“Oh, boo-hoo!” says the archaeologist who spends long days brushing sand away grain by grain on the off-chance that they might find buried treasure. “Go tell your sob story to the scorpions and the heat stroke!”

Please disregard the cranky archaeologist.

The point is that, as every archaeologist knows, if you want to find something, you have to look. I’ve said this before in other words and other contexts (e.g., Seek and You Shall Find). It bears repeating.

You have to look!

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Today’s Thought

Posted on 12/01/2017 by chick

Noticing is the first step toward knowing.

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Things Done and Things Yet to Do

Posted on 11/27/2017 by chick

I’m thrilled to be able to say that I’ve already gotten some of my Christmas tasks done. Shutterfly offered me free holiday address labels a couple of weeks ago, so I ordered them and they arrived last week. Yesterday I ordered personalized ornaments for the kids and my niece. I’m always glad to have that task finished, since if I wait too long the shipping times become an issue. The Advent calendar is another task that can’t wait, so today I made a rough plan for it and designed most of the tickets that will go into it. But what makes my progress extra impressive is that I’ve already purchased three major gifts (i.e., crossed three people off my shopping list) as well as several small gifts for the kids.

This week’s goals:

  1. Finish and order the Christmas card.
  2. Finish looking through the year’s pictures and upload them. I will try to finish the album in time to give copies out at Christmas. That’s usually what I do. But this year I’m willing to cut myself some slack. If it’s not done before Christmas, that’s fine, as long as it’s done by the end of the year.
  3. Trip to the outlet mall to buy gifts for my Mom and my niece, a special ornament for Marshall, money holder cards, a special request from Livia, and some odds and ends for the Advent calendar.
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There Is No Try

Posted on 11/24/2017 by chick

There are 46 posts in my drafts folder. This is a new record for me, but it’s not anything to be proud of. I hate to see so many unfinished posts, especially the ones about the kids. It also saddens me that some posts don’t seem worth finishing now, so they represent a lot of wasted time

I need to get my writing act together. The half-ass approach I’ve been using is wasteful and depressing. If I were to print out every unfinished blog post, essay, short story, novel, verse, song, and piece of work documentation, I’d be smothered by the resulting mountain of paper. I don’t want to die under a mound of unfinished work! If I must be buried in paper, let it be my collected published works, so I could at least die knowing that I’d accomplished something.

It’s time to commit to writing or give it up. Fish or cut bait. Or, as Yoda would say, “Write. Or write not. There is no try.”

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