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Remotely Running After My Hat
[Image of 18th-century dowser from Wikipedia... Wonder if it's sized to fit?] I’m going to be computerless much of this week. Which presents me with a convenient dilemma — to wit, how to do a whiskey river Friday post? You may be thinking: How, exactly, will this be “convenient”? Sounds rather like a pain, in [...]
Admin: Had This Been an Actual Alert…
Over the weekend, don’t be surprised or disgruntled or appalled or whatever if you find posts appearing and disappearing seemingly at random. I’m testing out some “blog posting by email” options and may be generating these things in bursts of multiple posts over the course of a single minute or two as I tinker with [...]
The Mysterious Clarities of Summer
From whiskey river (italicized portion below): Mind Wanting More Only a beige slat of sun above the horizon, like a shade pulled not quite down. Otherwise, clouds. Sea rippled here and there. Birds reluctant to fly. The mind wants a shaft of sun to stir the grey porridge of clouds, an osprey to stitch the [...]
Buh-Bye, Book-Buying Guilt!
The Missus has a refrigerator magnet which features a head-and-shoulders hand-tinted photo of a wealthy, hoity-toity society-matron sort of woman; the text alongside says, “‘Frugal’ is such an ugly word.” (Ha!) Like many people, I suppose, I have great ambivalence about acquiring ever more Stuff. Examined closely, expressions like Wow, that would be so cool! [...]
Destiny Has No Beeper
[See Note at bottom of this post for information about this image.] From whiskey river: Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Pssst that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such [...]
JES Has Come Unstuck in Time (by Choice and Training)
[See note at bottom of the post for information about this image.] One of these days, if I’m feeling very ambitious, I might expand this dream (from the other morning) into a whole story or book. Until then, feel free to use it for your own purposes. Should you take it to publication, I’m sure [...]
Paying Attention (or Not) to Word Count
So, bottom line: yes, at around 12:30 this afternoon I bounded across the 3,000-word mark in the 2010 Write Your A** Off Write-a-Thon. I’d gotten up around 6:30am, heated water in the teakettle, sat down at my desk and by 7:30 — after incidental stuff like selecting the day’s background music — begun to write. [...]
A** Over Teakettle
As a reminder — not that you doubted! — I’ll be intensely preoccupied tomorrow, for the 2010 edition of the New York Writers Coalition’s Write Your A** Off Day. I’ve mentioned before that this year, they’re sponsoring an online “write-a-thon.” Participants are urged to take the 3K Challenge: to shoot for a goal of 3,000 [...]
A Matter of Form
[See the note about this video at the bottom of the post.] From whiskey river: Any Morning Just lying on the couch and being happy. Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head. Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has so much to do in the world. People who might judge [...]
A Moment, a Moment Long…
[Image: The Meteor of 1860, by Frederic Edwin Church] This summer marks the 150th anniversary of a remarkable celestial event: an Earth-grazing meteor procession of interest not just to the scientific world, but to the literary one as well. It wasn’t just notable: it was flat-out forgotten until recently. First, some definitions: An Earth-grazing meteor [...]
