Closets of the Museum of the Weird

Weekend Assignment: Show off a personal possession of yours that you are reasonably certain other people don't have. Note this is limited to possessions: Don't haul up the spouse and go "neener-neener." Pets are also off limits unless it's a truly bizarre pet: We're talking like a hyena or an ocelot or something like that. Otherwise it's best to stick to physical objects. Also, as I've done a similar Photo Shoot in the past: don't recycle. Come on, you've got more than one odd thing in your house.

Extra credit: Pictures! I mean, obviously.

I'm telling you, you guys are insatiable! Or, at least, our friendly neighborhood Blogfather is. Here we are with another assignment that's tailor-made for showing off the latest round of exhibits from Casa Blocher, a.k.a. The Museum of the Weird. Things are still torn up around here because of the Library Conversion of Doom*, so I dug into a couple of closets for tonight's offerings.


I'm sure you can't tell what these are, and I'm equally sure you don't have one, although you may have a tiny component of one. These are "bricks" of minor chase cards from the Doctor Who trading cards, from the Premiere Cards subset. Both bricks contain quantities of the same particular card, featuring The Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker). The logistics of managing trading card distribution quantities meant that these were printed but never meant to be distributed. To do so would mess up the integrity of the series. John even wanted to throw these away, but I rescued them - repeatedly. These are the trading cards I wrote and John designed back in the mid-1990s. I'm still very proud of the work we did on them. However, I didn't write this particular card, because it had no text to speak of. It had a puzzle back instead.


Next we have a celebration of a bad president. No, not that one, but one from about 80 years ago: Herbert Hoover. I found this at a yard sale or auction or sometime during our eBay days. The eBay auction was won by John's best friend back in Ohio, but he forgot to pay the postage, or I was holding it until he paid for the unfinished Charlie Brown rug, or something. Maybe someday I'll ship it. It's only been a decade or so, maybe less. I suspect that the only reason West Branch, Iowa would commemorate Hoover with a coffee mug is that he was born there. Aha. Wikipedia confirms it: that's his birthplace. The article has some rather good things to say about the guy, so perhaps I shouldn't mock him.



Poor old Snoopy! This broken plastic Snoopy came in a box of stuff I got at auction. I've tried to reattach the legs several times without glue, but it just gets worse. The plastic has gotten so brittle with age that just trying to turn Snoopy's head for this photo resulted in the body cracking all the way around (where I was holding it). Still, I can't stand to thow it away, and John agrees with me on that. We once sold a 1969 Snoopy Astronaut for over $100 to someone in Japan. This wouldn't be worth anywhere near that, even mint in box, but, well, it's Snoopy!



Why, it's a milkmaid, and her google-eyed, furry dog! Actually, I have no idea why it's a milkmaid, but I'm sure that's what she is. She and the dog came in the same box-o'-junk as Snoopy. The dog is covered with real hair, or something very like real hair.



No, you haven't seen me on Quantum Leap, but I have interviewed a number of people who can make that claim, assuming they're talking to someone who watched that show a lot. We gave buttons like this to Liz Torres and John Cullum, and lots of other actors. This particular button is probably still around because it's defective. Notice the missing bit of black on the "m" in "Quantum". Still, it's a cool artifact of what Quantum Leap staffer Harriet Margulies used to call "a moment in time."



This is actually still in a closet as pictured here - not in the closet in my office where I found the other stuff, but the bedroom closet where most of the Halloween stuff is stored. The black thing on the left is one of those plastic cauldrons, and the fabric is from my Queen Cathma costume, but that's not important right now. John wanted me to show you this lamp, filled with Happy Meal toys from 20 years ago. Now I have. Taa-dah!

That's enough. Good night! (Look, Carly! I got the pictures to load on the third try!)

Karen

* We're converting one of our storage rooms into a library. So far, that's consisted of John hauling many boxes of stuff out to be stacked anywhere they'll fit, spending many weeks trying every possible technique to hang wallpaper, only to have it fall down immediately, painting the walls instead, and unpacking the tiles so they can "breathe" before being laid.


Technorati Tags: Weekend Assignment, Unique objects, Scalzi, Museum of the Weird

Diversions and Distractions

First, a miscellaneous photo and explanation:



This was the scene this afternoon outside Unnamed Largish Company. Yesterday, Tucson Electric Power replaced a pole, and I failed to get a picture for you. Today, about five guys in orange vests (or were they yellow ones?) were messing around with a palm tree near where the pole was. I have no idea why any of this was necessary, but they sure did leave a mess!

Tonight's entry isn't going to be anything too ambitious. I've been having all kinds of annoyances with the computer since installing the new Norton and AOL. The computer has finally stopped going online without permission, but for a while Norton was warning of intrusion attempts every five seconds, only to recommend that I "always allow." The information provided was deeply unhelpful, but I kind of gather it was warning me that AOL wanted to open a page I'd requested. Or something. Really, I have no idea, but it doesn't seem to have come from another user.

Worse that that, the computer is now extremely slow. Part of the problem is that the hard drive is almost full. I need to pull more photos and store them on CD. But the rest of it is clearly all the memory-hogging web-based applications in competition with each other. They're all trying so hard to protect me that I can barely view a web page at all. And I can't get the little "edit entry" pencils to show up in Blogger anymore. Phooey.

All of this is my long-winded explanation of the main reason I'm so distracted tonight. There are other reasons. I've been having digestive inconveniences all day, and I'm still not feeling great. I've been sidetracked by shopping for food that might make me feel better instead of worse, and by tv, and by a project involving last night's entry. Yes, I changed it, subtly, not entirely successfully, after hours of effort. Can you figure out what I did?



And here's another diversion to keep in mind. Next Wednesday, May 24th, is the date for the next Round Robin Photo Challenge, "Reflections," as suggested by Cheryl, a.k.a. BoiseLadie, of the blogs Welcome to My World and Life Through My Lens. I've started playing around with pictures for it, trying for an angle that won't be done by the other Robins.

One thing I like doing from time to time is to take pictures of the driver's side mirror on my car, trying to capture whatever amazing landscape I'm driving away from. You may recognize this particular view: Picacho Peak at sunset, as seen from the frontage road I was on this past Sunday evening. I boosted the color saturation on this, and lightened it a tiny bit. Really, though, the result is pretty much what I saw with my eyes.

If you'd like to participate in the Round Robin Photo Challenge, you're more than welcome to do so! Just read the Welcome and Rules of Play entry on the Round Robin blog,and leave your first name, blog name, and blog URL in the comments to the Reflections entry. Then take your "reflections" photo or photos, and get ready to post them on Wednesday, May 24th. Got it? Good! See you then!

Dang, I really wanted to get started on my editing today. Tomorrow, for sure.

Karen

Technorati Tags: Photos, Games, memes, Round Robin Photo, Reflections

You Must Restart For Your Changes to Take Effect

I've seen words similar to those in the subject line many times in the past 24 hours or so. My subscription to Norton SystemWorks ran out, and I ended up replacing it with a bundled combination of Symantec programs. I was downloading all night. I installed my downloads before work, at lunch, and after work, for an hour or more at a time. Over and over, I was told to reboot, and usually complied.

Then I would suffer through programs and processes that didn't want to shut down, and long waits during restart for my laptop to load a weather program I hardly ever use, and a spyware remover, and AOL Safety and Security Center, and who-knows-what else. XoftSpy's main goal on my computer is to delete an AOL-related program, Viewpoint, four files of which can't be removed until the computer is rebooted. As soon as I reboot, the program removes those last four files, and starts hunting for more spyware to gripe about. Meanwhile, the little orange light tells me that the hard drive is busy doing something else. That's right: it's AOL, reinstalling Viewpoint. Daily.

And Safety and Security insists on loading so that it can nag me about installing AOL's antivirus and firewall and other programs. It knows that I've got other firewalls, other anti-spyware, and other anti-virus. It doesn't care. Unless it's AOL's version, computer's security status is only "fair." I'd uninstall the Safety and Security Center if it were listed in my Add or Remove Programs menu, but it's not.

So anyway, the Norton programs want to go online for LiveUpdate and activation. But guess what? My only online connection is still AOL (yeah, I know!), because we haven't done the wireless home network yet so that I can get on the cable modem with John. This is a problem, because after the third Norton installation, AOL wouldn't load. It wanted me to restart, so I did. Still wouldn't load. It wanted me to restart again, or reinstall. So I dug around my desk for a recent AOL CD, and reinstalled. That got me back online. It also seems to have gotten Safety and Security off my back about not having the most recent version of AOL 9.0. Just how many versions 9.0 are there? Isn't that the point of version numbers, to let you know which one is the newest?

So okay, I'm up and running again. Fine. That's not really what I wanted to talk about, but I needed to rant for a bit.

Now I'm going to turn it into a metaphor.


Here's the thing. I'm always going on about how I'm going to reform. I'm going to go to bed earlier, eat healthier food, drink more water, get back to the gym, edit the second book, update the church pages more reliably, clean up my office, go through the mail...well, there may be more things I need to improve, but that will do for now.

Do I get any of this done? Not very often, no.

But I've done every one of those things at one time or another. For a while there, I was going to L.A. Fitness almost every night. For over two years, I was writing Mages every single night. I've cleaned, and I've lost weight, and I've put in a lot of time getting the church site looking decent.
Okay, so I didn't do all these things at once. Time is a major limitation on most of this stuff. An hour at the gym is an hour I'm not writing or editing, either the books or the blogs. Like AOL and Norton, these things aren't all that compatible with each other.

Yet in 2004, I was working full time, blogging, maintaining the church pages, and going to University of Phoenix on top of that. In 1993 (when, granted, I was younger, and more able to pull all-nighters), I was editing two or three fanzines at once, working full time, hanging out on Prodigy and later AOL, making a couple of trips a year to Los Angeles, and at least intermittently rewriting Heirs. So what is so hard about cramming into my current schedule a few more things that are important to me?

I suspect that I can't really expect myself to make all those changes at once. I need to add something and restart, and tweak as needed. I need to reboot my exercise program, or my work on Mages, and see if I can get both programs working at once. Then maybe I can slot in some of the other stuff, on weekends or a few minutes a day or something, like one of those scheduled tasks that software companies like to have my computer do.

Cha. It sounds like work!

Are you sure you want to shut down now? Be sure to save any changes.

Okay.

Karen

****Update*****
I came into my office at home this morning, and my computer was online. I checked my email, logged off, and left the room. When I came back, my computer was online. I looked for a program that might be requesting AOL, and found only Weatherbug, which I turned off. I logged off AOL again. As I was in the next room, I heard it redialing yet again. I checked every setting I could find on AOL that might be related, bearing in mind that I was already very late for work. AOL sent me to an XP Internet setting. This was already set on "never dial a connection," so what the heck? I exited AOL, and was working on shutting down other programs (not responding, of course) when AOL started to relaunch. I stopped it, exited it again, and told the computer to shut down.

So will my computer actually turn itself back on to restore the AOL connection? I'll know at lunchtime.

K.

Buttons generated at atom.smasher.org/error. I wish they were fully functional, but I did my best.

Technorati Tags: Software, Time Management, Personal

Looking Up, Looking Ahead

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Put your camera on the ground to shoot a picture of something you don't usually see from the bottom up. Call it the "worm's-eye view" of the word, if worms had eyes, which they mostly don't.

Supposedly my IN box, but I don't use it for that. The beige tiles are the ceiling.

Part of the Crosswalk of Death. From below it looks très moderne.

Other end of the Crosswalk of Death. From below
I kind of look like 1968 John Lennon, at least here.

Follow me to the top of my license plate holder.

Below the dog. Being beneath her eye level is
pretty much a guarantee I'll get my face licked.

As I experimented with photographing Tuffy from below,
another live critter came to rest directly above me:
one of the female hummingbirds.

Technorati Tags: Photos, Tucson, Birds, Dogs, Monday Photo Shoot, Scalzi


*******

Okay, it's time to come clean on the Weekend Assignment:

Weekend Assignment: Present three "facts" about yourself: Two of the facts true, and one of the facts false. Let people guess which "fact" is the fake one. Reveal the fake fact on Monday. You don't want to give away the fake fact too early, so be sure to make it sound plausible, next to the other two real facts.

I posted my answer here. (You can also scroll down about four entries to see it.) The relevant bit is as follows:

1. Don't get too excited yet, but Tor has asked to see the rest of the Heirs of Mâvarin. As you may recall, the publisher has had my initial submission package - cover letter, three chapters and synopsis - since February 23rd. Now the Neilsen-Haydens (or one of them; it was Patrick who emailed me) are interested in getting the rest of the manuscript. This is a big step forward, and a huge improvement over my one-week-turnaround rejection back in the mid-1990s. Still, there's no guarantee that they'll buy the book. I'm trying very hard not to count on it, but you know how I feel about all this. These novels are my life's work!

(The comments had three votes for that being the lie.)

2. I got a fairly substantial raise today at Unnamed Largish Company, as part of my one-year-review. I'm very pleased, and just a little surprised, because my first year won't technically be over with for another week. Afterward I called my Dad with the news, and he kept me on the phone for about half an hour. I can't really tell you any more about this, because of nondisclosure issues and personal privacy and all that. But yes, we have big plans for the money, mostly involving the payment of bills.

(One person voted for that being the lie.)

3. After months of excuses and health issues and just being too darn busy, I finally made it to the gym tonight. I hadn't worked out since Christmas. I didn't last too long, but I did use the treadmill, plus a shoulder press downstairs. I hope to do better tomorrow. Next time I'll have a fully-charged iPod with me, plus at last one bottle of cold water.

(Three people thought I didn't make it to the gym.)

And John Scalzi picked out the first item to highlight. I'm not sure whether that means he thought it the least likely, or just the most interesting.

Well, I'm sorry to have to admit that #1 is not true - yet. I have not heard a peep from Tor so far, for good or ill. Based on their posted response time, I don't expect to hear anything for another six weeks at least. But it is my fervent hope that that's what will happen, when something does finally happen. A fat envelope in my mailbox, containing three chapters, a synopsis and a form letter, would just about kill me at this point, although you know I'd eventually recover and send it out again.

I don't want to send three chapters out again. I want to send the rest of the manuscript to an interested editor.

Please...please...please!

Karen

Technorati Tags: Weekend Assignment, Scalzi, Lies, Writing

So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright

Okay, so this isn't about Frank Lloyd Wright, but I'm using that title anyway. My day did touch on his legacy, and I've had the Simon & Garfunkel song stuck in my head for many hours.

This afternoon I drove up to Taliesin West, where the famous architect lived and worked and taught. Named after a legendary bard, it's still a place where architects, school children and others go to learn. Unfortunately, I didn't have time for a tour, or even to take pictures; but I liked what little I saw. I'll have to come back someday and explore the place properly. Meanwhile, though, I was only able to rush into Taliesin's bookstore, meet Sarah and her parents, and rush out again with Sarah in tow. So long...so long.

Patsy Grimaldi's in Scottsdale. You can just about see
the brick ovens in the background.

You know how I get obssessive about things sometimes. (Only sometimes?) I was determined to try a Scottsdale restaurant listed on AOL as having some of the best pizza in the country. Sarah agreed, as long as it didn't interfere with her making her flight on time. So we followed my Yahoo directions to Patsy Grimaldi's Pizzeria in Old Town Scottsdale, a historic, upscale shopping district that now features a Starbucks, a Schlotsky's Deli and other franchise outlets along with the places that were there fifty years ago, such as the Pink Pony and the Sugar Bowl.

Patsy Grimaldi's isn't one of the restaurants that have been in Scottsdale forever, but it has its own pedigree and traditions, derived from the original New York locations. The service at the Scottsdale Patsy Grimaldi's was excellent, the decor evocative (red and white tablecloths), and I could see the coal-fueled brick ovens that are supposed to deliver a superior, authentic crust with a flavor you can't get with a modern oven.

The last half-slice of pizza.

However, I have to say that I was a little disappointed in the pizza overall. It had too much tomato sauce for my taste, and far too little of each of the four toppings we ordered: red peppers, garlic, extra mozzarella and mushrooms. More veggie options would also have been nice, especially since Sarah is a vegetarian. Still, I suppose that traditional New York pizzas never used to involve spinach or zucchini.

Still, we enjoyed the food and the conversation. Sarah had just come from her sister's wedding in Sedona, which apparently went spectacularly well. Sarah also recently toured China with a mostly Chinese-speaking theatre troup. I had no such wonders to offer in my half of the conversation, but Sarah didn't mind. Afterward, Sarah got the waitress to take our picture with each of our cameras.

Karen and Sarah.

Soon it was time to head for Sky Harbor Airport. As with my Google directions for Tempe last week, the Yahoo ones from Scottsdale to Sky Harbor let us to a road closure, in this case a closed on ramp. Soon after this, I found myself back in the same construction as last week. Nevertheless, we continued on University, and Sarah managed to spot the airport turn-off through the late afternoon glare.

Picacho Peak just before sunset, as seen
from the Dairy Queen parking lot.

The Southwest terminal was easy to find. I dropped Sarah off and headed for home. It was early yet, so I was in no great hurry. I stopped off at Picacho Peak just before sunset and went into the Dairy Queen with the gift shop and stuffed jackalope. The parking lot was nearly full. A guy was standing on the flat bed of his pickup, offering free samples of...something. I didn't even want to know what that was about. Inside, the place was crowded, so I left without buying anything. Instead I accidentally-on-purpose headed east instead of west on the frontage road, hoping for a few good sunset photos and an on ramp a few miles closer to Tucson. No joy on the on ramp, but I got the sunset photos, and a few photos of a freight train as it rushed by.

Picacho Peak sunset, as seen from the frontage road.

Next weekend I'll probably stay home, despite John and I having our 27th wedding anniversary on Friday. But I've thoroughly enjoyed playing vagabond these last several weeks!

Karen

Technorati Tags: Sunsets, Scottsdale, Personal

Once More, With Feelings

Do you ever have a day when you feel restless for no particular reason, and find yourself putting off everything you would normally do because you're in no mood for any of it?

That's been today for me.

Oh, it started just fine. I got my hair washed and still made it to the Red Cross by my appointment time, and succeeded in giving blood for the first time in the last four tries. My iron was high enough at 40 (minimum is 38), and they managed to get into my vein, and everything was cool and groovy.

But then I got home and checked my email, and there was nothing much there, aside from a few acknowledgments of my LJ piece. This has been one of those dead Saturdays when nobody seems to be blogging. Even Scalzi is conspicuously absent. I hope that means he's having a belated birthday celebration with his family.

And I had a frustrating conversation today with someone about whether I "screwed up" and "lied" Thursday night in writing something that wasn't true, even though seven of the ten paragraphs in the entry either stated or implied that one of the remaining three paragraphs was a fib. My friend thinks he should be able to skip to the part he's interested in and take what he sees at face value, without having to worry that I might be lying about it, or that he's missed some vital information in all that introductory stuff. I think this is nonsense, but it bothers me. It's been bothering me all day.

Another irritant: Sunday, as far as I'm concerned, is Motherless Day. People tend to assume that because I'm a female adult, it's appropriate to wish me a happy Mother's Day. But I'm not a mother, and never have been. And my own Mom is no longer alive to receive my gifts of pansies or irises. It's been decades since we gave her those, anyway.

I finally finished reading that free Tor novel, A Princess of Roumania by Paul Park, which has kept me up nights all week long. It's a good, engrossing book, but a little unsatisfying in some ways. The writer spends many more pages inside the head of the antagonist, the villainous, pathetic and slightly mad baroness, than in the heads of the eponymous Princess and her friends. The result is kind of unbalanced and discomfiting. I don't end up with much feeling about who Princess Miranda is, how she feels and why I should care, whereas I end up rooting for a murderess. The book stops at a crisis point, and so I'm stuck waiting to find out what happens next. (The 2006 season of Doctor Who on the BBC also ended in a cliffhanger tonight. Drat.)

Do people like cliffhangers? If they're annoyed, and want to get to the next bit right away, that proves that the story is engrossing. That's a good thing, right? But I hope that when Mages of Mâvarin is finally published, probably in three volumes, people will be able to scratch their reading itch by buying the rest of the story that same day. One volume a year just isn't going to cut it. That will be up to the publisher, though, not me.

About that. This is another reason I'm feeling restless. Last weekend I was surrounded by people who are actually doing what I want so badly to accomplish myself: writing books and seeing them hit the stores, even win awards. After thirty-three years, Heirs of Mâvarin may finally be on its way to becoming a real book. I'm happy and anxious about that, and will continue to be so until I hear the magic words, "We want to publish your novel." But what about Mages, my "magnificent mess," as I like to call it? When am I going to get that ready for submission: clean up the inconsistencies, add more concrete description, tighten the prose and give the three sections of the story a veneer of self-containment? Isn't that what I should have been doing today, instead of reading and shopping and sleeping? Isn't that what I should be doing every night? And yet I don't, because it seems like such a big job, and I don't know how to find my way in to do it. Do I work with files or printouts or both? Should I drag my laptop to B&N, or just clean my desk off so I have room for the printout? Do I take it from the top, or figure out where I left off last time? I know I've been over and over the first five pages. I'm sick to death of them. But where can I pick up the story, and be sure that I've made all the corrections I took notes on a year or two or three ago?

Ack. Enough.

The highlight of the day was a phone call from a friend, making arrangements to meet me tomorrow. It was amazing to hear her voice, although it's a perfectly normal voice. I've known her online for about 14 years, but never met her. I think I may have called her once before, years ago, but it's still cool to actually talk to her.

So tomorrow I drive up to the Valley of the Sun (that's metro Phoenix, according to the Visitor's Bureau hype) for the third time in less than a month. I doubt that I've ever been up there this many times in quick succession, except to see Arizona Fall League games in 1993 and 1994. But this time I'm going to see Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West in Scottsdale, at least from the outside. There's still an architecture school headquartered there. Then we will go eat what's supposed to be the best pizza in the state, and chat until it's time to drop my friend at the airport. I've spent the evening printing out Yahoo maps and directions, because last weekend Google's map stranded me on a closed street in Tempe.

It should be fun. And the two hour drive each way may be exactly what I need to get over this restless feeling.

Karen

P.S. Another thing I'm restless about: I keep forgetting to mention the next Round Robin Photo Challenge, "Reflections." Please see the Round Robin blog for details. I'll try to do a proper promo here later.

And Part Four of The Jace Letters has now been posted on my fiction blog.



Technorati Tags: Phoenix, Writing, Personal

Cross Post and Minor Updates

On Monday I wrote a longish essay in response to Jess's Writer's Weekly Question. I posted it on my LiveJournal rather than here, because that's supposed to be where I write about my writing process and related subjects. Besides, I hadn't posted anything there in many weeks. I had to do something.

But when I displayed the result, nearly everything I'd written was missing - gone forever, not saved anywhere except in my head. So I wrote it again, a little less ambitiously than before.

I don't know whether anyone's even read it.

Anyway, Jess is at it again. My Harlan Ellison story apparently inspired the following question:

Writer's Weekly Question #15:
Name a few famous writers you have had an up-close-and-personal encounter with. Did the encounter have an impact on you and your writing in some way? If so, how?

I wrote my answer in my LJ again, but I'll post it here too, mostly to get out of writing another long post tonight:

I could write a whole series a posts answering this, and probably have. Heck, I haven't even exhaused the subject of my experiences with Harlan Ellison yet. But yes, I've met other writers over the years, and yes, they've had an effect. In brief:

• Robin Scott Wilson co-founded the Clarion SF Writer's Workhsop. He taught the first week of Clarion '77, the year I was there.I actually don't remember anything specific that I'm sure he said and nnot somebody else, but it was all very informative and encouraging at the time. He may habe been the one who said that "The truth is no excuse." The fact that something has happened in real life doesn't make it believable in fiction. You have to make it work dramatically. Good advice, that. There were a numbers of good bits like that at Clarion, catch phrases encapulating little principles, traps and techniques. 29 years later, though, I can't be sure which writers were behind which bon mots.
  
• Peter S. Beagle taught the third week of Clarion that year. Aside from Harlan, he was the writer I most wanted to meet. This was because a) I loved his books, and b) he was a fantasy writer, and I was already at work on my own fantasy novel. You know the one. But crushingly, Beagle didn't like my opening chapters of The Tengrim Sword, as it was called then. Worse, he couldn't even tell me why he didn't like it! He couldn't tell me much of anything, really. He was mostly an instinctive writer,not a technician. He had no advice for me, no encouragement. I did enjoy hearing him read from his work, though. And it was a bit of a revelation to know what someone can write that well without having specific, objective techniques to pass on to others. On the other hand, I heard that at least one other Clarionite learned a lot from him. Why couldn't I do so, too?
• Algis J Budrys (shown at right) - writer, reviewer, critic - taught the fourth week. We called him Ayjay. One of my favorite bits of plotting advice comes from him, I think: "Get your protagonist up a tree; throw rocks at him; get him out of the tree." He liked what I'd done so far on the novel, which did a lot to repair the damage to my confidence that Pete Beagle had caused. Another interestiing thing about him was that he'd written a book I liked, called The Falling Torch. What I like about it was that the protagonist spent two thirds of the book trying to decide what to do. Once he finally decided to go to war, I turned the page, and the fighting was already basically over! I loved the idea that the decisuion was the important thing, not the actual battle. But Ayjay told me an editor had cut a third of the book!
  
• Kate Wilhelm and Damon Knight (he's the guy with the beard, right) taught the last two weeks together. I don't remember a darn thing Kate taught, but she cooked a great London Broil for John and me one night. in aid of our Atkins diet. Damon seemed to contradict a lot of the writing advice we'd had to that point, even some of his own. He also discouraged the heck out of me when he said he had theimpression that Mâvarin ended "ten feet beyond the road." I disagreed strongly, but the truth is that I wasn't big on concrete detail in those days. I've worked hard over the years to overcome my talking heads syndrome, in large part because of Damon's remark. Damon also taught about the business side of writing, which I found more helpful at the time than the actual writing advice. Oddly, though, I've since bought a book of Damon's writing advice, and it all resonates with me, nearly thirty years later.
  

I'll probably come back to this subject later. I have more to say, but I'm very sleepy now.

*****

I have a few updates related to last night's posted bits of real and fact news about happenings in my life:

• One of the true items has since been proven just slightly false, and it's all my fault.
• My beloved husband skimmed last night's entry today, totally missed the one-false-item and two-true-items premise, and assumed the false item was true. He even told someone else about it. I am aghast and agog about this. He's blaming me for "lying" in my blog.
  
• Today I planned what to do next if the false item were to become true.

Karen

Technorati Tags: Writer's Weekly Question, Writing, Clarion