postaday

June 22, 2013

Writing Every Day

Writing can be a bicycle made of lead. It’s much easier to stop than to start.

I’ve got two quotes that help propel me forward again after I stall out.

One is by the scientist and activist Linus Pauling, who won two Nobel prizes  (chemistry; peace):

The way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.

The other is by musician, song-writer, and record producer Nick Lowe, who had this motto in the recording studio at Stiff Records:

Bash it out now, tart it up later.

Finally, this comment by jazz great Thelonious Monk to a newer musician gives me courage to try something different:

You are making the wrong mistakes.

June 21, 2013

A Stark Beauty

burnedtreeswithclouds

Wildfires can be so destructive and at one time I hated to look at a recently burned hillside. However, I have come to realize that a burned slope has a unique, stark beauty.

The Station fire was a large wildfire in the San Gabriel Mountains (near my home) in 2009.

The Station fire was a large wildfire in the San Gabriel Mountains (near my southern CA home) in 2009.

The fire burned hot and fast and the slopes looked like this afterward.

The fire burned hot and fast and the slopes looked like this afterward.

But, a few months later, each of those moonscape skeletons already showed regrowth.

Within a couple years, the hills were back to looking like this.

Within a couple years, the hills were back to looking like this.

Of course, part of my appreciation may come from knowing that around here, the hill likely holds native chaparral plants which are adapted to wildfire and usually bounce back, no matter how dead they initially seem.

June 20, 2013

Alligator Bubbles

Everywhere in Florida there are Beware of Alligators warning signs but after several trips to Florida with no ‘gator sightings, I was despondent. So the family took us to a long walkway inserted into the Everglades, and I saw this alligator – dive below the surface. See him? Right where those rings are.

Alligator evidence.

Alligator evidence.

Note to other travelers: we visited the Everglades in late summer. Mosquito season. Not recommended. (With three applications of bug spray, wearing long sleeves and pants, we got away easy with only a few thousand bites. Each.)


(Posted as part of the Weekly Photo Challenge.)

June 20, 2013

Canine Kindness

True story from some friends…

Peaches was a rescue dog who liked being the only dog. A big, arthritic German Shepherd, she had the air of a retired police dog (though she wasn’t one). On walks, she avoided other dogs, and when house guests visited they had to leave their dogs at home.

One night on a walk, she suddenly dragged her people across a street toward another dog. They feared her attitude had worsened and that she was about to pick her first fight. Instead, she stopped next to a morose stray and sat down. Never had a dog looked as unhappy with freedom as this stray did.

The stray was short and funny-looking, with a barrel chest and a long pointy snout. The people named her Edna and – with Peaches’ clear permission – they brought Edna home. No one ever answered the Lost Dog signs they plastered around the neighborhood and so Edna joined the family. Peaches continued to tolerate her until Peaches succumbed to various old-dog ailments several months later. 

Edna lived for many more years, delighting all who met her with her goofy, gregarious, and loving ways.

Edna looked like a cousin of Frankenweenie.

Edna looked like a cousin of Frankenweenie.

(Written for today’s  Daily Prompt.)

June 18, 2013

My Top Ten Risks (Whfff! Crash! Boom!)

Pavlof Volcano, Alaska, 2013

You see the plume and … do you run toward it or away?

I’ve got a whole list of risks I might take if only I get the nerve or suffer the judgment lapse. In decreasing order of sanity, they are:

  1. get a puppy (training a puppy sounds so unpleasant);
  2. write a novel and publish each chapter on the fly as serial fiction with no future writing in reserve (what if I hit a block? what if yesterday’s chapter was crap?);
  3. form a rock band and perform (what if no one attends the show? what if they do?);
  4. host a live talk show (what if I lose my glib?);
  5. take up surfing (risk of embarrassment is higher than physical risk, given zero chance of my standing to ride a wave);
  6. meet my heroes (what if they don’t deserve that status?);
  7. retire before I’ve got enough income (I don’t need to explain this one, do I?);
  8. sky dive (I be afeared of heights);
  9. become a tornado chaser (what if I drop my camera and miss that great shot of the looming tornado?);
  10. become a volcano chaser (when an eruption is eminent – the mountains themselves are not a challenge to catch);

I note that 8, 9, 10 may alleviate some of the risk in 7.

(This post responds to today’s Daily Prompt  which asks: what’s the biggest risk you’d like to take…and what would have to happen to get you to take it?)

June 17, 2013

An End to Needless Worry

(Today’s  Daily Prompt says: write a letter to your least favorite trait.)

Dear Anticipatory Hysteria,

We’ve been together so many years and we will both have to adjust to life apart. But there is no question – it is time for you to go. I remember when you first came around. I was a teenager and noticed that nothing I ever thought would happen, did happen. So I began to imagine terrible things, because if I thought of them then they wouldn’t happen – a mental talisman. But the strategy never really helped. The terrible imaginings didn’t prepare me for other bad things that happened instead. Rather, they cost me so much time, energy and peace of mind — and kept me absorbed in misery that never materialized.

My new strategy is to note that I will have plenty of time to feel bad about something after it actually happens, and in the meantime I will do my best to keep my thoughts in the present tense, and to focus on all the positives, including the fragrance of the jasmine and the sounds of birds greeting the morning, as I write this on my front patio.

From now on I will save my apocalyptic imagination for my novels. There it serves me very well and has proved invaluable as I write my fantasy detective series.

P.S. Wherever you go next, please make room for your parents, Worry and Anxiety. Their eviction is in the works now.

June 16, 2013

All Mod Cons

Elmore Leonard published the novel Pagan Babies back in 2000 but I just read it this week. It is an Elmore Leonard book, therefore the plot is full of cons and double crosses, the dialog is witty, the prose is terse, and the characters are gritty and lively – oddball yet believable.  In this book, Father Terry  leaves Detroit half a step ahead of the law to become a rural priest in Rwanda during the recent genocide. During his first mass, some forty souls are slaughtered in front of him where they have sought sanctuary. After five years, Dunn returns to Detroit and gets caught up in the schemes of local mobsters and with Debbie, an aspiring stand-up comic who just got out of prison for hitting her ex-boyfriend with her car. The ex-boyfriend conned her out of $67 grand and she hatches a succession of schemes to get payback.

On LibraryThing and Goodreads I gave this book 4 stars. It probably only merits 3 stars. Consider the fourth a gratitude star. I can always depend on a Leonard novel to be worth reading.

I really needed a good read after having just forced my way through Quinn by Iris Johansen. My first and last Johansen. The writing was  flabby and weak. All the dialogue sounded just like the narration and I hated the narration. The characters were romance novel cliches crowbarred into a thriller format. And the plot. Oy, the plot. Sensual, fragile yet tough forensic artist Eve quests for decades to find out what happened to her missing daughter, aided by hunky FBI man and former Navy Seal Quinn. One suspect is her hunky ex-lover, former Army Ranger and father of the missing girl, who doesn’t know whether he killed the girl or not because sometimes his brain short-circuits thanks to torture by North Koreans. But he must be innocent because the daughter’s ghost appears to him as well as Quinn and Eve. Aaaaaaaaaaaa. I can’t say why I wasted the time to finish this (I skimmed the second half) except I knew it was a best seller and wanted to see why. I found no explanation. To restore my faith in book buyers, I tell myself that the other two books in this trilogy must be way better. You won’t get me to test that theory.

Johansen fans – I regret if I have offended you. Looking for a positive – we will never compete for her library books!

(This post comes from this Daily Prompt.)