Oh look, it's (almost) October 1st

And some of us know what that means. It means we, the few, the proud, the angst-ridden, have signed up for NaNoWriMo, or in its longer form, National Novel Writing Month.

We are students, we are parents, we hold full time jobs, we have spouses and significant others, and we are prepared to forsake all of that to spend thirty days glued to our keyboards or duct taped to our legal pads. The actual writing never begins until the stroke of 12:01am on November 1st, but October? October is filled with the sheer joy of plotting! Making outlines! Scribbling scene ideas on 3x5 index cards so that we can shuffle them at will as we control our fictional little pieces of the world.

We busily post our introductions to the message boards at the official site, and we squeal about how we have the most amazing ideas ever, and we research. Oh mercy, we research until we know, we just know that it's going to be perfect!

We stock up on coffee, or M&Ms, or sugar-free gum; we buy a funny hat to wear when we're writing so that no one will dare bother us. (The hat is a signal to our loved ones, but seriously? They don't need the hat to know that we've gone completely insane.) We plan to attend local write-ins. Remember love-ins? They're sort of the same, but with laptops, and pencils and pads, and with clothing ... well, anyway. We attempt to flock together with like-minded people in our hometowns once a week and challenge each other to word wars. Word wars!

Sounds serious? You bet. But it's just about the most fun you can have for thirty days as you work your way from absolutely nothing up to 50,000 words. That's right, 50,000 words in thirty days. Just for laughs, the Thanksgiving holiday is thrown into the month and you are descended upon by hoards of relatives who do not understand your continual need to sneak away and write 'just a little more'. Thus, you really don't have a full thirty days, now do you?

What do you write about? That's up to you. Find something you like, take an odd idea and roll with it.

The quote below is a favorite of mine. Embrace it, and then read the entire article.

Know the needs and desires of your characters; find out something they want badly, and take it away from them.


Dramatic plotting made simple


See you at the finish line!

Redbirds and reminiscing

Last week I meant to post a follow up to my Wordless Wednesday post, the photograph of the cardinal in my back yard. Busy-ness and life seemed to get in the way, so I thought I'd add a little postscript now.

Cardinals are my favorite birds, hands down. I can thank my family for that, mostly my daddy. Although I am a south Florida native, the rest of my family was born in West-by-God Virginia. (If you're from that neck of the woods you know exactly what I mean, and if you aren't? That's okay, it mostly matters to those aforementioned neck-of-the woods folks.)

The cardinal is the West Virginia state bird, and growing up I always knew that. We had a huge ficus tree in our back yard, big enough that the shade covered most of the grass. For those of you up north, the ficus trees are those spindly looking things that you find in large decorative pots, usually in hotel lobbies. The first time I saw one of those in my University up in DeKalb, Illinois, I laughed. It seemed so absurd that the climbing tree of my childhood had been reduced to this caricature of nature. I wanted to set it free, to send it out into the world to seek its true potential! Go! Run free!!!

But I digress.

Our backyard ficus tree was home to what I perceived to be hundreds of birds. My daddy's favorites were the family of cardinals. He made sure I saw the 'redbirds' every time they came to the feeder, and I knew that the female was more of a subdued, muted brown. Daddy Redbird was a sight to behold. Vivid, stunning red, with a call that I will always recognize.

Our feeder was not as stunning, however. It was a beat up old aluminum pan whose handle was long gone, its shine had disappeared years before. As I look back, I think it might have been from one of mama's first sets of cookware. Daddy filled it religiously and became extremely put out if the pigeons showed up; or the squirrels. The feeder was a temptation to them both, as he left it in easy access in the center of our ceramic picnic table. (I think it was more fun for him to complain and puff up protectively than it would have been to simply move it.)

I grew up, married, and moved away. My dad passed on, and eventually the tree had to be cut down. Mama passed away 14 years later and my sister and I sold the house. Just before mama died, we bought our current home. It's on a spacious corner lot, and the lot just behind us has never been developed. It's full of Australian pine trees. In hurricane season we fear for our roof, their trunks are so soft. But the trade off? The trade off is that I now have my own redbirds. They visit my patio, they perch in my trees, and they visit my feeder.

My daughter is carrying on the tradition of listening for them, for helping keep the feeder full and ready. The pigeons of my childhood are nowadays extremely fat, well fed mourning doves, but at least my feeder has not attracted the squirrels. Yet.

I can hear them outside now, time to go fill the feeder.

On Monday ...

On Monday We E-mailed Jokes
Author Unknown


On Monday we emailed jokes.
On Tuesday we did not.

On Monday we thought that we were secure.
On Tuesday we learned better.

On Monday we were talking about heroes as being athletes.
On Tuesday we relearned who our heroes are.

On Monday we were irritated that our rebate checks had not arrived.
On Tuesday we gave money away to people we had never met.

On Monday there were people fighting against praying in schools.
On Tuesday you would have been hard pressed to find a school where someone was not praying.

On Monday people argued with their kids about picking up their room.
On Tuesday the same people could not get home fast enough to hug their kids.

On Monday people were upset that they had to wait 6 minutes in a fast food drive through line.
On Tuesday people didn't care about waiting up to 6 hours to give blood for the dying.

On Monday we waved our flags signifying our cultural diversity.
On Tuesday we waved only the American flag.

On Monday there were people trying to separate each other by race, sex, color and creed.
On Tuesday they were all holding hands.

On Monday we were men or women, black or white, old or young, rich or poor, gay or straight, Christian or non-Christian.
On Tuesday we were Americans.

On Monday politicians argued about budget surpluses.
On Tuesday grief stricken they sang 'God Bless America'.

On Monday the President was going to Florida to read to children.
On Tuesday he returned to Washington to protect our children.

On Monday we had families.
On Tuesday we had orphans.

On Monday people went to work as usual,
On Tuesday they died.

On Monday people were fighting the 10 commandments on government property.
On Tuesday the same people all said 'God help us all' while thinking 'Thou shall not kill'.

It is sadly ironic how it takes horrific events to place things into perspective, but it has. The lessons learned this week, the things we have taken for granted, the things that have been forgotten or overlooked, hopefully will never be forgotten again.

Wordless Wednesday, Cardinal

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How to make a mom cry

Our Marine Son™ in Iraq left me a comment on my MySpace page this morning.


Hey mom i love you and i will be home in 2 weeks.

Thursday Thirteen (#1)

This week I'm trying something new. I have spent fourteen years posting to forums from the old AOL 1.5 days, through the various incarnations of the email lists that are now housed at Yahoo. I spread my wings to Live Journal (and several of its clones) in February of 2003 and never looked back.

Oh I still use some of the email lists, I have some very dear friends there, but blogging has become my best venue for journaling my thoughts and my irritations with life, both in general and sometimes very specific.

Today I discovered (thank you Plurk friends!) ThursdayThirteen.

With yet another hurricane setting its sights on South Florida, I thought I'd offer my list of:

Thirteen Things I Need to Do to Prepare for Ike

1. Check our hurricane supplies and make a list of what needs to be refilled or replaced.

2. See that both cars have full tanks of gas. Even after our experience with Wilma three years ago, not all service stations have generators to run the pumps.

3. Withdraw a decent amount of cash from the ATM and tuck it away for the days after the storm. (See number 2, the ATM's need electricity as well.)

4. Wash clothes and especially towels. There's that pesky lack of electricity problem again.

5. Find a card deck or two, including UNO. Replace if need be.

6. Charge all of the rechargeable batteries for the camera and the old school MP3 players. The iPods will eventually die and there won't be a way to recharge them.

7. Print out a list of phone numbers for online friends.

8. Print out info on exactly how to post by phone to Live Journal and Twitter. Maybe Plurk, too.

9. Designate a few online friends to post updates to various places once we're in the all clear. Text messaging saved my sanity in the three weeks following Wilma when we had no power and no land line.

10. Which reminds me, I need a car charger for this phone. It's only a little over a year old, post-Wilma.

11. The last items are bigger and more difficult. Mostly, it involves securing our house. This entails covering the windows and bringing inside anything that has the potential to become airborne in 135+mph winds.

12. I need books. I will dust off some paperbacks that I've had sitting around for a while, and I might take a trip to my favorite second hand book exchange store. LuAnne Rice books, in case you were wondering.

13. M&M's. Yes, M&M's. My very shallow, guilty indulgence, hurricane comfort food. Diets don't exist when you're playing 5 Card Stud by candlelight, and in a pinch they can be used instead of pennies or poker chips. Best of all? The winner can eat their earnings!


The best that we can do is prepare for the worst and hopefully, rejoice if we are spared. The worst that we can do is ignore the God-given days of advance planning time that we have.

See you next Thursday.


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