Who goes there? Please leave comments so (An Aries Knows)!
New book! Writing prompts. You know what that means.
Okay, students, sharpen your pencils and return to your seats. Here’s today’s assignment. There’ll be no grade, and I won’t even see it unless you write in comments.
Begin…now.
I’ll just be at my desk binge watching “Suits” thinking about what you’re writing.
Yesterday was a challenging day, and it’s just so freaking hot here, like everywhere, that when I finally settled in last night, I decided to open up my ebook of Carolyn Haines’s latest Sarah Booth Delaney mystery set on the Mississippi Delta, Tell-Tale Bones. I just kept reading and reading and finished to realize it was around three am. Oops!
Still woke up a bit early, so I decided to make it a gentle kind of work day in front of the fan with lots of water nearby.
For one thing, after that big writing sanctuary reorg and cleanup a couple of weeks back, I put my day planner, for which I use Patti Smith’s book as a reflection point, above my eye level. Thus I was something like eighteen days behind in making entries. But there were lots of things I wanted to make note of during those days (like, for example, the birth of our grand-niece!), so I applied myself to getting everything up to date.
On a whim, I pulled the 300 Things To Make Me Happy book off the shelf, too, and flipped through it until I came to this page and answered the questions.
Recently, when I was organizing some craft bins, I found a bunch of 30-year-old iron-on transfers that I’m sure are way past their usable date. Instead of tossing them, I decided to save them as coloring pages.
I colored this one today and kinda love him.
Now I’m ready to read and make small changes to the first book in the Neverending Saga. I hope this is a fast process for all first five books. Then I’ll be ready to input my edits to the sixth and move on to writing number seven!
Hope you’re all having a comfortable Saturday, whatever the weather’s doing where you are. Please stay hydrated!
Usually when I use the journal Lynne gave me last May, I color a little, write a little, etc. It means that if I want to take a photo of it, I have to block out whatever I’ve written because that journal, at least, isn’t meant for public consumption. So this time I colored, photographed, then wrote.
If my coloring choices are too subtle or are unfamiliar, let me be clear. The top colors are from the transgender flag. I absolutely support transgendered people and am appalled at the hate, lies, and vitriol being directed their way by an ignorant, cruel public and by legislators and courts. Once again, a person’s right to privacy, particularly in medical matters, is being violated, but even worse, there is a blatant call to eliminate transgendered people. This is fascism. This is inhumanity. This is immoral.
The middle colors should surely be familiar after decades of LGBTQ+ activism and progress, which is also currently under attack in terms of privacy and equal rights. If you don’t know where I stand on this issue, you’re new here.
I chose those last colors for all the people over decades who attended Sunday school or Vacation Bible School and sang, “Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.” Some of y’all had a lot more sense as children.
Also, I’d like to make note of my belief that if you think a child is too ignorant to recognize when a person is in costume, then maybe you need to avoid or end: Santa Claus; the Easter Bunny; Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas pageants; Halloween and every costume from Super Heroes to witches, to cartoon or video game characters, to ghosts and zombies and skeletons and vampires; high school, college, and professional sports team mascots; Chuckie Cheese and other characters in costume used to push products (Ronald McDonald? Hamburglar? that Buc-ee’s beaver? Mr. Peanut? Tony the Tiger? the Michelin Man? the Jolly Green Giant? the Chick-fil-A cows?); all characters in costume at amusement parks (yes, even princesses); the musical Cats (is that too easy?); and military, royal (real or Game of Thrones), religious, angel, fairy, gnome, hobbit, magician, wizard, circus, bodybuilder, hunting, role playing, chef, police, firefighter, nurse, doctor, judge, race car driver–whatever costume aka “drag” of all types that will ensure that you’ve stripped the world of everything fun, whimsical, imaginary, and creative.
I only wrote all of that because it isn’t what I wrote in the journal with the coloring pages, and I needed to put it somewhere. You’re welcome.
My 2023 planner came. It’s inspirational and funny and quirky. I’ve been catching it up from Jan 1 until today with my daily doings and writing progress and using the photos and commentary from Patti Smith’s Book Of Days to nudge me in various directions of memories and thoughts.
It’s been a long time since I kept a date book. I’ve been mostly discreet with what I put on this blog because of my privacy and more importantly, other people’s. When I go back through my old date books and planners, there’s a lot of good info in them! Even these days, living a sheltered quarantine life, things are always happening.
Too bad I didn’t video myself putting on the monthly tabs for the comedy of it all. First, the tabs were going down the side at the beginning of each month, but it was aesthetically displeasing. I kept redoing it, and it felt like I needed to do geometry to space stuff right. I don’t do math unless I have to.
I was getting so frustrated when I suddenly started giggling and thinking, This will be probably the most UNIMPORTANT part of this planner. Make it easy on yourself. I promptly put them on the top–in exactly the worst place because of the elastic band that holds the book closed. 🙄 Moved them to the left and don’t give a flip if they’re all aligned and perfect. Can’t remember me ever personally being aligned and perfect. This planner and I were made for each other, and I can’t thank its creator, Adam J. Kurtz, enough for being exactly who he is.
Not as many pages to shred from this slender journal, but once again, it felt good to let them go. There are still some raw feelings expressed here, but they are truths and lessons I do well to remember, so they can stick around a while. It does help me to read the POV of a woman in the time I’m writing about. Sometimes I forget just how intense the twenties were. The answer: very.
Still watching DVDs in bed until I feel better. =)
Many pages from this journal are now gone. This will probably be the first of several similar posts. Shredding is shedding, and shedding is freeing.
Meanwhile, it’s October 1, official beginning of Spooky Season! My fun skeleton, Lord Cuttlebone, is out of the closet and back on the pages of Instagram.
There is an ever-growing list of things I can’t find. I think my dogs are gaslighting me. I might have to add a candle of St. Anthony (patron saint of lost things) to the Justice and the Songbird. Kidding. This isn’t an altar, but boy does the writing sanctuary smell divine.
In today’s search for what I didn’t find, I turned up three additional years of personal diary pages, so that organization task is still happening.
My mother gave me this five-year diary, my first, for Christmas when I was in eighth grade. I think I’ve blogged it before. She wrote a note that says, “To Becky, On Christmas: Don’t ever do anything that you would be ashamed to write in this book—and have me read. Mother.” Ha, and she did read it all the time, even though I tried to hide it in my room.
Because of her ferreting skills, I wrote in code a lot, and I’ve only reread bits and pieces. I was boy-crazy, my mother drove me crazy, my father was deployed in Korea, my sister got married, and I loved music. I wrote consistently for a while the first year, skipped a year, and wrote a little bit in it again the third year, and that third-year stuff is one pissed-off teenager. That’s when my parents made me change schools, and I was miserable.
I enjoy seeing the things I put in the back of this diary, including friends’ phone numbers. I couldn’t provide the phone numbers of anyone in my life today, thanks to the way we use names, not numbers, to call cell phone contacts. But from junior high—Lynne’s, Teresa’s, Tim’s, Riley’s, my own—I can still rattle off those numbers like I was calling them all just yesterday.
Fun fact: Since I can’t remember current-day phone numbers, Tom’s going to have a disk engraved with his phone number to add to the bracelet I always wear (it has my Medic Alert info). If I lock my keys and phone in the car, I’ll know what number to call using someone else’s phone.
Back on October 14, I shared this book by Adam J. Kurtz and a page from it for circling some favorite things. Here’s another recent page, and clearly I don’t listen to any music from this century, but whatever (and also, this page made me listen to The Antlers’s “I Don’t Want Love” and it’s from 2011).
When I look at that list now, I’d add Gladys Knight singing, “Neither One Of Us (Wants To Be the First to Say Goodbye)” because it keeps running through my head while I’m writing. I wonder if other writers’ hearts break when their characters’ love stories don’t work out.
I digress.
I also mentioned in that post that Kurtz had a new book coming out, and I recently received my copy thanks to a very generous offer from him and his publisher, and I keep flipping through it and finding new things to make me smile or think or steel my determination to just be me and stop worrying about whatever it is that plays on a loop in my brain when I can’t sleep.
I appreciate that Kurtz has followed his creative vision his way. One thing I like about both books (and there are more things in his shop that I’ll be buying) is that I feel like a friend is talking to me, saying the things a friend needs to say, that I need to hear, and most of all, being vulnerable and so making me feel a little less vulnerable, if that makes sense. On the inside front cover is written: Even small changes help us transform as life unfolds, whether you’re chasing your dreams or trying to get out of bed. You are here but you’re not alone.
Also, my book came with some extras. Who doesn’t like free stuff?
You can find out more about Adam J. Kurtz at his website, and he’s also on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube.
I got this book some time back, but maybe I’ve only referred to it on Instagram, where I follow the author, Adam J. Kurtz (that’s the link to his website). He has another book coming out soon, You Are Here For Now which I plan to look for in a local bookstore and if they don’t have it, ask them to order it. Check out his site if you’re interested.
That’s a page from 1 Page AT A TIME that I chose to do today because sometimes, simple decisions are the only ones I have the energy to make. Even then, I ran a dialogue in my head (I like mustard just fine, but I probably eat ketchup on more things, but while I’d put a dash of mustard in potato salad, I would never put a dash of ketchup/ I love red and like wearing it but I live in the subtropics and blue is cooler/ I like my fries hot but my beverages cold/ why am I thinking of these in terms of food and beverages, is it because I forgot to eat lunch blah blah blah).
My choices:
Note that I took the footnote seriously and TOOK CONTROL when I couldn’t choose between two things.