Friday Five

1. I proved to myself (again) today that if you ask me to talk about something I like, well, you’ll get me talking! I did my first teleseminar this morning, with Linda Joy Myers of the National Association of Memoir Writers. This had been scheduled for a while and I did my homework and thought of possible questions that might come up and thought of possible answers I might make. (Okay, I TYPED UP those possible answers.) And then, of course, what happened was that Linda Joy had wonderful questions of her own, and I didn’t look at my notes once, and I just talked and talked and hopefully kept it interesting. We discussed lots of general critique stuff and, I think, managed to also make it specific to the problems & choices around critiquing memoir. Hey, I had fun.  Linda Joy will be sending me the audio at some point, which means–yes, another WordPress challenge for me–figuring out how to put a link up to the audio on my website. More fun. 🙂

2. Today is one of those weird weather days we get in California, where it’s overcast and looks like it would be cool outside, but is actually very still and warm and muggy. I’m not going to put the actual word here, because why tempt the fates, but it definitely feels like ________ weather. Californians will know what I’m talking about. Hopefully, we’ll just get a bit of noisy thunder and this, too, shall pass. Peacefully.

3. Husband and I recently transferred to a new bank, and thus I recently purchased a new version of Quicken. Remiss does not begin to describe my finance-tracking habits of the past few years. But no more! Software is loaded, I’ll be putting in the basic data tonight, and then I…WILL BE GOOD. But, you know, there’s just no creativity to paying bills.

4. Wrote a new scene this week, based on all the railway station/immigrant research I’ve been doing. LOTS of description. LOTS of observing. SOME thinking. ACTION…um? From my MC?  Thank the muses for revision. And, you know, revision.

5. Today is September 11. My son was, I think, in kindergarten all those years ago, and we wondered whether we should send him to school, way up here in our little mountains. We did, and I didn’t realistically worry, but it felt as though he was much further away than down one road and up another. And it felt as thought New York and Pennsylvania and Washington, DC were, also, very far away and yet so, so close. Someone else, probably many someone elses, said it today, but it doesnt’ matter what side of the political fence I’m on, that date is never going to be just any other day, ever again.