I’m taking online classes and only writing in fits and starts, so I thought I’d let the WordPress wheel of chance direct me today.
A man who impacted me positively would be my grandfather. Howard Morrow was born in a small town in Illinois where his father owned a pharmacy and he jerked sodas when he was a teenager.
He married my grandmother and worked for a while in a coal mine. They had my mother then moved to California. He had tuberculosis and was 18 months in a sanitorium and then on 18 months bedrest. He opened a store to repair shoes and eventually went to work for a company as a sort of electrical engineer. He had no formal schooling, but was brilliant. He taught himself anything he wanted to know—without the internet—both technical and artistic.
He and my grandmother came to live with us in north Idaho when I was in junior high. I hung out with him nearly as much as I hung out with friends.
In hindsight, I know he was imperfect. Very. He didn’t lie and cheat, he kept himself cloistered emotionally from his family. He was highly creative and didn’t share that freely. He loved strangers and listening to their stories, but he didn’t listen to his own wife or daughter.
I’m naturally a lot like Howard. I push myself every day to be a creative person, but also very different from my grandfather. Because in the end, your creativity may touch strangers, but your family will be impacted by your presence. Or lack of it.
We have one more shopping weekend before Christmas. If you are still in that mode, godspeed. If you’re finished, congratulations. If things are hard this year and shopping is out of the question, prayers and/or good wishes towards those you care about never go amiss.
This summer I went through a bout of depression. I’d like to say I fought like a champion. I fought it sorta. In the morning I worked on a story alteration and the rest of the day I’d watch my husband look for a job. There was the added bonus of wondering how long we would be without one, because when you’re in your 60s it’s a toss-up in the maintenance biz. Yes, it was stressful. When he finally got a job, I didn’t get over the bout for a while, so instead of drinking–too expensive–I watched You Tube videos.
I know that human beings are voyeurs, me included, but WOW!
courtesy rawpixels.com
Grocery Hauls and Meal Prep are my favorites. Who knew it could be so restful watching other people enumerate what they got at the grocery store? And there are the craft videos! Motivational videos, speeches by the notorious and the unknown. Home repair and home dec. The number of channels dedicated to Dollar Tree/Store/General is staggering.
Now I know what writers mean about wasting time on You Tube. I thought it was all cats. Nope. Cats and so much more.
A couple of my favorite You Tube channels:
Grocery Hauls and Prep: FREE TO FAMILY (Frugal living, family, meal prep) JENNIFER CHAPIN (Home, Recipes, Hauls) DO IT ON A DIME Dollar (Store/Home Dec/DIY/Frugal) AMBIENT RELAXATION (Music and ambient noise to write to) HEADBANGER’S KITCHEN (Recipes for Ketogenic diet and metal music) STERLING AND STONE (Writing. Some great vids on plotting and character development. Skip Worst Show Ever vids as they are tiresome with guy antics and language.)
My one caveat, aside from all the wasted time, is that these are not professionals and there’s no production team to point out faux pas. It’s a great exercise in grace. And a great way to see just what you can do with all that Dollar Tree swag!
Note: I wrote this blog post using Google Docs tool, voice typing. So no, not all the mistakes are my own.
In the winter you expect to be sick at some point cold flu heart attack from shoveling the driveway something is going to be follow you at some point during the winter months. So, here I am sick as a dog with some sort of gastrointestinal distress. we’ve changed our diet too low carb and I think that may have something to do with it. I don’t have any intention of running into the kitchen in scarfing down a bunch of crackers, but I think today is going to be a high water consumption day.
As an added bonus the dog is vomiting in the kitchen. Fun times
I’ve been messing around with dictation. I’m using Google’s typing with voice. it actually works very well considering it’s free and it’s Google. I suppose everything I dictate is being written down somewhere and kept for future reference just in case I offend all the wrong people. Which is completely possible.
I am having enough success in dictating to the computer that I think I will get a microphone. I have watched a couple of podcast of people who have gone to this method of writing and both say that having a decent though not terribly expensive microphone can make all the difference in the accuracy of the text that you wind up with. Next paragraph
I’m not sure I’m ready to try and write a story this way. with voice typing there is a limited amount of formatting commands that are at your disposal. I don’t want to have to edit for a longer. Then I am writing. Yesterday, I wrote a 3000 word outline of a short story I’m working on and that went very well but the text was very garbled. part of that is that there are a lot of names that even with the names loaded in Google’s dictionary for my account the typing app doesn’t seem to recognize. My hope is that a microphone will solve that.
Above I mentioned a short story I’m working on,. this will a be the second short story. The first one I got four thousand words into and realized that it’s a great story but it’s not going to fit in the Anthology it’s 4. But at least I have four thousand words on what will probably be a novella length peace. The new outline is for a story that I have been noodling with for a while. all I have to do is make myself go light and funny and stay out of the dark corners. that’s hard since it’s in the corners where we always where I always seem to find the most interesting things to play with.
The gastrointestinal distress is burbling a lung and I have to go and I have to go and relieve some stress.
I’m thinking about just posting this as it is without editing out all of The Oddities of Google’s voice typing. it’s actually a lot like hurried texting. I’ll think about it. Later
NOTE: (This note IS edited.) That wasn’t bad for a meandering, unscripted mind dump. And it sounds somewhat like me. I have a tendency to edit the original voice right out of things. I tried WORD’s dictate feature earlier. It has fewer commands than Google Voice Typing. If I keep dictating, I think I see having to buy some software in my future.
There are no spoilers in this post. It was written before The Walking Dead season finale.
I never saw All My Children’s Erica Kane Deal with this stuff!
When I was eight, I spent the summer with my grandparents in Chatsworth, California. This was a big deal as I lived in north Idaho. I got to fly by myself, visit the cockpit, and get a set of captain’s wings. It was also the first time I ever saw a grilled tomato. Full breakfasts were served in those days and even a child got a pretty decent meal.
I remember a lot of things from that summer but the most special thing was sitting down with Grandma, at three in the afternoon, with a can of root beer and a small bowl of puffed cheese snacks to watch All My Children.
All My Children was one of a dozen soap operas that populated daytime television in the 60s. When I was an adult, I moved to the Midwest and everyone called soaps, “stories.” Hence the title of this post.
This weekend my daughter and her two kids were over at the house, and an advertisement for season finale of The Walking Dead came on. My daughter was holding my little grandson and she said, “Look, Elijah, there’s an ad for Grandma’s story.” She had me Dead to rights.
I gave up soaps years ago. They are all the same story line, and now I see they were mostly the same characters from the 80s and 90s. I haven’t missed anything. But I did become the new kind of Deadhead. (I think some viewers are young enough to have missed The Grateful Dead and don’t know that name is already taken.) But there are Walker Stalkers, Deadites, or the Watching Dead. Though, none of those really fits. I’m just a fan.
When the show came out in 2010, I heard about it. If you were minimally online, you heard about it. I didn’t care. Once in the distant past, I had tried watching the movie, The Night of the Living Dead, and was bored outta my skull. This lead me to believe that zombies just weren’t my thing. They weren’t then, and they really aren’t now.
The appeal of this gore-fest for me is, there moral questions that come up for those surviving a zombie apocalypse that just never make it past the, d*mn-I-broke-a-nail problems of the clean, well-dressed, well-connected doctor/lawyer/billionaires that populate the standard regular soap opera.
But on TWD you have to deal with questions, such as:
Weaponry: blade or a gun? Perhaps your best success will be with a blunt object and brute force?
Is it best to soak rotting flesh stains, or can you just pretreat?
Who do I trust, and will I destroy their brain if they die so they don’t turn into a zombie?
If a zombie is clutching a bag of Cheetos, once I dispatch said zombie, is it safe to eat the cheesy bits of heaven if the bag is still sealed?
Are zombies the person they were when they were alive, or are they nonpersons, and okay to use as targets?
How do you raise sensitive kids in a world where sometimes compassion involves breaking someone’s neck?
Am I really a horrible person when the only other person in my group, who loves pickled beets as much as I do, turns, and I’m j-u-s-t a little bit glad because that leaves more for me?
Seriously, there are great questions that come up in this show. Some of them I push aside in favor of just rooting for the bad-guy-turned-good, Daryl. I cried with Carol when her young daughter staggered out of burning barn, clearly now a zombie. For all the jokes, I hope Carl grows up to be a decent, non-psychopathic, young man for whom killing is the only skill he has to offer the world. And I always sigh when Maggie and Glenn find each other after some horrible separation.
Yup, The Walking Dead has replaced the standard soap opera as my story, and I’m sticking to it.
Wentworth Wednesday will return next week at its regularly scheduled time.
For a while I have been working to arrange a move for my mother. There are lots of moving parts and I’m not all that good at multitasking these days. To keep my sanity, I have been working on a new story. I finally got far enough in and was confident I would keep with it, so started posting the story on Beyond Austen. Captain Wentworth’s Guide to Romance and Travel: Lyme Regisis Persuasion without Louisa Musgrove’s fall from the Cobb. This past week I was in the trenches of packing boxes, paper, tapes, and Sharpie markers. Wednesday is the day I had chosen to post and so a week ago I put the flash drive in my computer to retrieve the post, and, VOILA! The drive was emp-ty.
Not a crumb remains.
A few years ago, I took Laura Hile’s loss of thousands of words in a computer crash as a warning and started keeping all my writing on flash drives. A couple of years after that I starting getting serious about organizing my writing, graphics, and private business. Yes, indeedy, I did.
So much for my trying to be grown-up.
I’m thankful for two things: that I was hip-deep in real life and not focused on my writing, and that it took several days to realize that the aforementioned story wasn’t the only thing on the drive.
I’ve now officially lost one whole novel, two partial–each hovering around 175 pages–several outlines of novel ideas, and countless graphics I had created for this and other blogs, and several book covers.
There were many family photos as well, but I have found them on other drives and online haunts of mine.
I am home now and have signed up for an automatic, online, cloud storage service.
Lessons learnt: exhaustion keeps you from going ballistic when the unthinkable happens, and back up your back ups. And then back it all up again.
Note: I wrote this blog post using Google Docs tool, voice typing. So no, not all the mistakes are my own.
Susan Kaye, writer 