Drained

  Gone Fishin'

  (Yeah.Sure.Right.I wish.)

  Haven't gotten around to blogging this week.

  Busy time for me.  First week back in the rat race in awhile.

      Mentally and physically exhausting. Trying to rid myself of other aggravation with varying degrees of success. It would really help things a lot if everyone around me would cooperate!

     Spent large part of weekend revising something. Finally out the door. Well, maybe not finally.

     Just want to watch TV  now.

    That's all, folks.

Blogs

         On one of the blogs I follow, Angela Ackerman's The Bookshelf Muse, Angela recently asked commenters to provide some of those blogs they "can't live without."
         Personally, I love The Bookshelf Muse, with its great tips and wonderful emotion and setting thesauruses.
         After receiving lots of great comments about other blogs, Angela posted the responses today.
         I am reprinting them here.  Many of them I already follow and a few I've already linked to on this blog. (Some of Angela's suggestions are geared toward childrens, middle grade and Y.A. and writing. You can sort those out on your own.) 
        I didn't do the links for the Writing and Authors section. Frankly, there are zillions of blogs and sites out there--many of which are not on the list-- and I didn't check these out.  I'm including them, anyway. You can click on The Bookshelf Muse to get those yourself! It's well worth the trip.
Agents & Industry
Rachelle Gardner's Rants & Ramblings
Nathan Bransford
Mandy Hubbard
BookEnds LLC
FinePrint Blog
Janet Reid
Kidlit.com
Getting Past the Gatekeeper
Pub Rants
Guide to Literary Agents
The Intern
Edittorrent
Editorial Anonymous
The Rejecter
The Blood Red Pencil
Pimp My Novel
Writer Unboxed
Query and MS Tuneage
Query Shark
Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips
Query Tracker Blog
Public Query Slushpile
The Book Doctor
Plot to Punctuation
Darcy Pattison
Miss Snark's First Victim
Your First Page
Writers, Authors & Writing
Adventures in Children's Publishing
YA Highway
Kiersten Writes
Jody Hedlund
Shrinking Violets
Anita Nolan
Market My Words
Elana Johnson
Grab a Pen
We Love YA
Margie Lawson
Spilling Ink
Sisters in Scribe
Hey Teenager
Cornell Deville
Angels and Demons and Portals. Oh My.
Word Play
The Bluestocking Blog
Literary Rambles
Candace's Book Blog
La Femme Readers
Mystery Writing is Murder
Writers' Alley
Romance University
Super Mom Writes
The Deadline Dames
Cynsations
Pretorios
Beth Revis
Neil Gaiman
Laini Taylor
No Letters on My Keyboard
Words From the Woods
Falen Formulates Fiction
Fiction Groupie
Mark of the Stars
Readatouille
From the Mixed Up Files
Through the Toolbooth
Writer Jenn
Elizabeth Craig's Twitter
Writing for Children
The Graveyard Shift
Shooting Stars
Mary DeMuth
Between Fact and Fiction
Limyaael's Rants
Southern Princess
Cat Woods
Daily Pep For Writers
Laurel's Leaves
Weronika Janczuk
Shannon O'Donnell
Womagwriter
Jill Kemerer
Let the Words Flow
Practicing Writing
A Brain Scientist's Take on Writing
Sara Merrick
Slushbusters


       

Time

       Salvador Dali's famous surrealist painting, The Persistence of Memory, shows clocks melting across an arid landscape.

      The softening pocket watches are said to depict the passage of time in dreams, or time's irrelevance.  I used to like to think the painting showed the way the pain of loss, embarrassment and cruelties of the past fade with the haze of distance, allowing us to look back without hurt.  The work was titled The Persistence of Memory, after all.
       Now I recognize the distortion aspect better. When we are young, time stretches before us, endlessly.  Christmas or that trip to Disneyland may only be a week away, but the moment takes eons to arrive.  As we age, time flips by. A year zips past with the speed of a dragonfly.
       After a spate in which I had lots of time on my hands, I will return to work--and have none. During the last months, time melted and dripped all over the place, and still,  there was quite often never enough of it. Procrastination became a fine art, a piece of work worthy of a frame in the Museum of Modern Art. And then...it was gone.
       Now, instead of dripping from rocks and barren trees, time will be gobbled by PacMan.

        I gave myself a week to prepare. That's half gone already and the rest of the week is filled with engagements and commitments that will not allow me to loaf around, finishing up things I wanted to do. Or just wrapping my ahead around the  concept of having to set the alarm clock each day.
      Years later, after the dropping of the first atomic bomb, Dali revisited his theme in The Disintegration of Persistence of Memory, exploding the barren landscape along with the melting watches.

             Time doesn't really explode, though. It doesn't march on. It melts, no matter how much or how little we have of it.
  

Hudson Valley Magic for The Dream Voyager

           Someone loves Rafe!  Aside from me and Katy and some of you guys.

           Turns out "Rafe" may be more tired than I imagined, though...even taking into consideration that he's been dozing for three hundred years.  His name's apparently tired, anyway.

           So...if we were going to pep him up and call him something else, what would we call him?

           Keep in mind, he's a hotter, hunkier, more sizzling and steamy (about to be a LOT more sizzling and steamy) version of this guy...and he's a Van Winkle.

So "Raphael" is probably also out of the question.

Roy? No.

Roger? Definitely not.

 Ralph? I don't think so.

Rick?

Hmm.

I could probably live with that.

What do you think?

Suggestions welcome.

  

Keep on truckin'

              Back in the day, long before Cherry Garcia twinkled in  Ben & Jerry's eyes, there was a band called The Grateful Dead.

The Dead put out an album called American Beauty  that featured a song called Truckin'. 

      (Perhaps self-prophesying their future linkage with Ben & Jerry's, the Dead would also put out a live album featuring a kid sticking an ice cream cone in his head. But, of course, I digress.) 

         What I really want to talk about is Truckin', which has been recognized by the United States Library of Congress as a National Treasure, and how we keep doing it. Or not.  (And you thought I'd never get around to writing, right? Ah, ye of little faith.)
        These are the opening lyrics:

Truckin' - got my chips cashed in

Keep Truckin - like the doodah man

Together - more or less in line

Just keep Truckin on  

         The point of the foregoing is this: We've all just got to keep on truckin'.

            As you can seen from the date of this blog post and its predecessor,  I've had a little trouble doing that lately. Stuff has got in my way. It has also gotten in Lara & Cole's way, but I try to keep them appeased with a tweak here and a tweak there, at the very least.

            The stuff that has got in my way is not stuff that prevents my butt from being glued to my chair; it is just stuff that makes my mind wander. Distractions. I think those of us who do not face deadlines regularly may be led astray more easily than those of us who do. ("Oh, look, a cloud.") 

            But as Twitter makes clear, even famous authors under contract pressure sometimes have one of those days where they Just.Can't.Write. Others are desolated by rejections, are waiting, waiting, waiting to hear about submissions, or have let so much time go by since they last put pixel to screen that they have to struggle to recapture the feeling, rediscover the zone. 

           So I thought I would start a new page up top, which I'm going to call "Truckin.'"  I'm going to try to chronicle what I've done each day, even if, as today, all I've done is tinker a bit. I hope you will join me in keeping track of how far you've come and what you're doing or planning on doing, and whether or not you've met your goal for the day. You can comment on the Truckin' page whenever you feel like it.

           Dr. Wicked's Write or Die might inspire some of you.
           Come on, play along.

           You don't want to be this guy, do you?

                                    

          

Bikes

     So yesterday I went back to court (actually two different courts, two different counties, am and pm) for the first time in months.

     I would like to say the experience was like riding a bicycle but it was more like falling off one. Yes, been there, done that, too.  Actually, considering each appearance was under an hour and I had the middle of the day to nap and the end of the day to fiddle with the newly-arrived Sony Pocket (Yay!  More distraction!) it's not a completely intolerable way to make a living.

     But, as usual, I digress.
     Speaking of bikes...
     I've suddenly decided there will be one in Lara & Cole's future.  Actually, more like their past.

   
Cole: Hop on, baby.
Lara: You're kidding me, right? It's got to be like 20 degrees.
Cole: Hike up your skirt and put your arms around me.
Lara: Man, the things I'll do for a story...not to mention a black and tan on the house.[climbs aboard]
Cole: All set?
Lara: [slides arms around Cole's waist; concludes method of transport has its perks; learns something about "bartender"] Hey, big guy. Is that a gun under your  jacket or are you just glad to see me?