Lopez Lomong is carrying the flag of the United States in the opening ceremonies of the Olympics today.
He is a refugee from Sudan, one of the Lost Boys, who came to America in 2001 and settled in with a foster family in Central New York. His foster parents, Robert and Barbara Rogers, took in six boys from Sudan who had lost everything. This article about Lomong and his American family should raise a lump in your throat.
We are very proud to call this amazing guy one of ours!
Over the weekend someone slashed our “Obama for President” sign with a knife. Sliced it into ribbons.
In honor of that person, I’ve decided to make another contribution to Sen. Obama’s campaign.
I am actually a more conservative person than most people might guess. I am a registered Republican, although the leadership of both parties makes me weep. You have to be a registered something around here. My husband and I own guns and we hunt. I believe in balanced budgets, personal accountability, small government that stays the heck out of people’s lives, and in the old-fashioned concept of Americans caring for each other. I believe that the Bush administration is the worst thing that has ever happened to America, and that under Bush’s leadership our country has been sold out to the interests of major corporations. I want my country back.
I support Sen. Obama’s position on energy use, healthcare, education, and getting us out of Iraq.
I have read Sen. McCain’s position papers. I don’t agree with most of them. If he is elected, I don’t think the country will be in as dangerous a position as we have been under the Bush administration, but I don’t think Sen. McCain really grasps the situation of working people in America. He seems out of touch and his proposals lack vision and depth.
So the Obama signs are going back up on the trees that face the road. They will be hung so that they can be seen by passers-by, but anyone who wants to destroy them is going to have to hike a little to get to them.
Along with the “Obama for President” signs, we’re going to post the following message, to anyone violates our Constitutionally-protected private property and destroys our Constitutionally-protected right to free speech by ruining our statement of political support.
The extra sign will say this:
1. You are trespassing on private property.
2. You have already been photographed. (by a scouting camera)
3. You are standing in a sea of poison ivy.
Three cheers for the First Amendment!”
I am neck deep in 18th century lists of military stores; things like powder horns, bayonet belts, grapeshot, and bear skins. It is heavenly!
I spent the weekend on the road. On Saturday I went to the Fort Plain Museum in Fort Plain, NY for a small (but wonderful) Revolutionary War encampment/reenactment.
Sunday was a long, fantastic day at the RevWar encampment/reenactment at Old Sturbridge Village. Nearly one thousand reenactors were there: soldiers, artisans, women, and lots of their children. All of these people are passionate about understanding the Revolutionary War and have made it their hobby. They go to these encampments to live as people did in the period. They dress, cook, work crafts, relax, have military drills and mock battles all as close to the original thing as possible.
The reenactors could not have been more generous with the time. I asked a bazillion pesky questions about the tiny stuff – how does one fire a flintlock musket in the air (answer: one usually doesn’t), the finer points of cooking in a dutch oven, and the art of rolling paper gunpowder cartridges.
Back to work on my story now. Remind to tell you about the guy who let me taste gunpowder…
Not only have I worked on books every single day this year, but I posted to the blog every day in July, too. That’s so much blogging, I think it qualifies as blahhhhging. I have no idea how people do this regularly.
I will not be posting as much in August. The new book is whining for more attention and the tomato harvest is beginning to roll in which means I’ll be canning. (Yes – photos – I promise!) I welcome any and all salsa and zucchini recipes!
(One food preservation question – has anyone frozen zucchini?)
So blogging will be sporadic this month. Come September I’ll revert back to my obsessive ways, I promise. CHAINS will be published on October 21st and there will be lots of tour madness to share.
But now, serenity.
The first sunflower out back just bloomed.
Happy August, all. Good Lammas, too.
Dang, that was fast!
Today is the last day of July, the last day of my Write for Fifteen Minutes A Day challenge. Congratulations to all of you who participated!!!
If you missed the beginning, or you’d like to see all the entries I made about the challenge this month, then the tag function provides a short-cut to them.
If you’ll grant me a moment on the soapbox, I want to explain why my focus is on time spent writing, rather than word counts, like NaNoWriMo.
Don’t get me wrong; I love word counts. I track my own in a first or second draft because it gives me a sense of accomplishment when the characters and story are still primodial slime oozing from page to page.
But I worry that word counts can give writers the wrong impression. Just because you’ve written 50,000 or 100,000 words doesn’t mean you’re done with your novel. It might mean you’ve completed a draft. It’s the quality of the words and the structure of the story and those etheral things like voice and theme that really count. When/if you weave all of those threads into a coherent world, then your story is ready. How long that takes varies dramatically from writer to writer and book to book.
(For those of you who want a score card, it usually takes me seven drafts to write a novel.)
Some days I can hammer out words, crank out page after page after page. Other days, I’ll spend on one scene, sometimes one stretch of dialog. If I were to measure those against each other, it would be easy to see the day in which I wrote fewer pages as a “bad” day. Which is nonsense.
I believe the critical component of writing is the daily commitment to the task. If you touch base with your story every day – even for fifteen minutes – you are mulling it over somewhere in your mind. That’s why I structured WFMAD the way I did.
I’d love a little feedback from those blog readers who participated in WFMAD. What was it like for you?
WFMAD 31
Today’s goal: Write 15 minutes.
Today’s mindset: proud and relieved.
Today’s prompt: Write about what this month’s challenge did or didn’t do for your writing. Write about what made it hard to carve out fifteen minutes a day. Or was it easier than you thought? Do you want to maintain this habit? If so, what changes do you need to make to your non-summer schedule?
Scribblescribble….