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My unique talent

Our house sits atop a small hill that is covered with sugar maple trees. You know what this means, don’t you?

Sticks. Millions and millions of sticks.

BH is a man of many talents. He can build just about anything, fix most everything else, and run every power tool ever made. He does most of the serious work around here. Me? I can daydream and read real fast. You know what that means, don’t you?

I am the Official Stick Picker-Upper in our family. So that’s what I did today instead of going to the gym.

I have decided that we have shameless, wanton trees who shed their sticks with perverse abandon. I am convinced that all of the other maple groves in the area are inhabited by prim and proper trees who know how to hold on to all their bits in a stiff wind.

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Happy Feb!

Thank you so much for the great questions you all shared with me yesterday. I will attack (and try to answer) them sporadically through the month. If you think off anything else, just ask.

I am taking a two-day break from my research to work on the outline for WIP2…. I have to see how much I know to figure out how much I don’t know, if that makes any sense.

Today is Langston Hughes’ birthday. When I was growing up, I had a poster in my room with a few lines from one of his poems, “Dreams”.

It read:
“Hold fast to dreams
for if dreams die
life is a broken-winged bird
that cannot fly.”

Words to live by.

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Question for teen writers

I have been asked to contribute an essay with my advice to teen writers.

Not surprisingly, I have a lot of it.

But I should probably go to the source, and make sure I am approaching this from the right direction. So here’s the question:

If you and I were getting together for tea (coffee, hot chocolate, etc.), and you had one writing-related question to ask me, what would it be?

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Sunrise

The funeral and family stuff filled up all of Saturday. The pastor was an 80-year-old woman; the perfect choice for my Aunt Janet. I think I want an elderly woman with a crinkly smile and slightly shaky hands to stand in the pulpit when it’s my turn to go. (Which, btw, I have scheduled for sometime in the the mid 2050s.) After the service we trooped back to my cousin’s house and caught up with each other and laughed a lot. That’s how our family deals with pain – we laugh at it. Don’t get me wrong. There have been a lot of tears shed over her death, moments of absolute rage and sorrow. But now we have to keep going, and we might as well do it with a smile.

Spent yesterday reading letters and journals written during the Amer Rev. These didn’t have anything to do with the incidents I am focusing on in my book. I was reading them for language, looking for phrases and words which people in the time period were comfortable using, and which I can appropriately use in my story. I have a lot more of that in front of me today.

I also finally unpacked the last of my boxes of books from the move last summer. I can’t afford the bookshelves I want yet, so for the time being, they are laid out on the floor, watching me type. It was so nice to see some of them again. I missed them.

Yeah, I’m strange like that, but it works for me.

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Thoughts while waiting for the coffee to brew

Happy Birthday, Wolfgang!

After a slight wobble when she called CNN two weeks ago, Oprah retakes the crown as Queen of the Known Universe. Thank goodness. Did anyone actually see the show?

I had a moment last night when I was IMing three of our four kids at the same time. It was so cool I could barely contain myself.

I have another massive list of books for BH to fetch home from the library for me. I’m going to need new glasses by the time this research is over.

I keep looking for situations in which I can say “Gotham” and “dolt”. Do you ever do that, obsess over a word for a while and try to shove it into sentences where it doesn’t belong until your friends scream “Cut it out! God, you’re such a dolt!”

Hee.