yourpassions.tk

This is a day that the Lord hath made. Let us rejoice and write stories in it. — Sharon Lippincott I've had a busy week. Our daughter was here for Thanksgiving with her toddler and husband, and shortly after they left, I came down with a bug (fortunately short-lived). Consequently, I haven't spent time writing for a week now. This could have been a disaster for the blog, but fortunately I had a small backlog that I could pop into place with a few clicks of my mouse. My backlog is now depleted, but it won't stay that way long. I woke up with my head simply buzzing with blog/story ideas. Knowing all too well how important it is to honor my muse Sarabelle when she pays me a visit, especially such a bountiful one, I headed straight to my computer and started half a dozen new posts. If my backlog gets too full, I'll simply post more often for awhile. One of the insights she gifted me with was the fact that I now have ninety-four posts in this blog, which began on February 7...

The trouble with writing about the wilderness is that there is almost none of it left, and so, although more and more writers are born, grow up and appear in print, fewer and fewer can possibly have even an approximate acquaintance with the wild destroyed world on whose splinters we stand. — Edward Hoagland I recently found that quote on Susan Albert's Lifescapes blog. It especially appealed to me because I grew up on the edge of the wilderness, and live on the edge of a forest today. Nature and wildlife have always been dear to me, and it's hard for me to imagine not being able to wander in the woods. Sometime back I wrote this paragraph about the mountains of northern New Mexico: Those mountains shaped my life and my abiding love for the woods. Alone among the towering pines, I was my own best self, free from all expectations, pressures and competition. I knew even then that the forest had healing powers. The memories from those mountains pull me back to being my own best ...

A cheery, lilting song has been running through my mind the last few days. It goes something like this: Oh bring the turkey, golden brown, the mashed potatoes light, The cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie, my, oh what a sight! We'll eat and eat until at last, we've had too much, but then, Thanksgiving comes but once a year, so we can get thin again! I learned this song in third or fourth grade in music class and we probably only sang it one year. We learned dozens of those songs through the years, but this is one of the two or three that stuck in mind. I call this one my “Thanksgiving Carol” and I always hear it sung by children's voices all around me, with my own voice belting it out right along with them. The tune takes me back to my early childhood Thanksgivings. Those all blur together. Many years we went to visit one set or the other of the grandparents (I was fortunate that all four of mine lived to become great-grandparents), and there were often lots of cou...

Someone recently asked what I’ d recommend as the one single thing they could do that would help their writing the most. I answered with one word: Toastmasters . Most people think of Toastmasters as an organization devoted to improving me mbers’ s peaking skills. It definitely does that — with a number of fringe benefits. The primary value of Toastmasters is the practice you gain in learning to organize your thoughts. To make a point in the five to seven minutes available for club speeches, you must pare your material down to its bare essence. There is no time for clutter or extra material. This process of digging for golden nuggets of meaning transfers into all areas of communication. Your conversation becomes more precise. If you are in sales, you’re bet ter equipped to assess needs and define benefits with laser-like precision. If you teach, you’ll l del iver streamlined lectures that emphasize the main message in a smooth and logical flow. Your writing will become lean and spare....

A few days ago Herm posted a comment about the blog That's Not How I Remember It . Herm's concluding descriptions lit my day: ...He sandwiched the meat of laughter between the bread of raised eyebrows. When I finished he simply said, "That's not the way it happened at all." I rewrote with the flames of my memory and the icicles of his testimony. It melted into something that was reality for both of us. Wow! Sandwiching the meat of laughter between the bread of raised eyebrows. Flames of memory versus icicles of testimony. Don't those analogies just give your inner writer joyful goosebumps? Herm is one of my "virtual" writer friends. We met several years ago in the Yahoo Lifestory group. The first story he posted had me sitting on the edge of my chair in admiration. A couple of years ago his story, "Denied the Prize," was published in Chicken Soup for the African American Soul . Obviously Herm has an innate gift for story telling and depic...

My posting rate has slightly slowed lately due to minor technical problems. I understand that these problems will probably go away if I switch to the new Blogger format, which also gives advantages like the ability to assign categories to each post. Now, how cool will that be, to find all the posts on, say punctuation, with a single click? In another month or so, the choice will no longer be mine. Blogger will switch everyone. So, why on earth have I dawdled, rather than immediately switching? Now, that’s a story I’ve never written. It goes back to my junior year in high school when I read George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty Four in English class. This novel made my skin crawl. I grew up in Los Alamos, NM, where nearly every family had at least one member with a Q clearance, the highest security rating at the time (as far as I know), and for much of the time I lived there, security guards limited entrance to the town to residents and invited guests. Perhaps the novel made more of an...

I recently had a leisurely lunch with a longtime friend, a rare luxury. During the course of the conversation we discovered that our memories of a project we collaborated on over a dozen years ago are as different as night and day. Each of us gives the other credit for instigating the undertaking. “What a great story,” I replied when I heard the other side. “That’s not how I remember it, but it sounds good.” “What do you mean? How do you remember it?” My version was like a mirror image. “No way!” My friend plans to do a journal check to see “how it really happened.” “I’m eager to hear what your journal says, but if it's different from my account, I’ll remind you that initial perception shapes memory, and we may have perceived it differently to start with. What difference does it make? We’re happy with the outcome, so probably we're both right, or the 'truth' is a combination of our memories.” I went on to suggest that we each write the story of how this project began so...

Last week I read a letter written for the purpose of defending and rallying support for an important cause. The letter is unlikely to achieve that purpose and could even sabotage the effort. Among its flaws, it failed to clearly state the purpose, and supporting evidence for a poorly organized list of complaints was lacking. The effect was somewhat like scattering dots on a piece of paper without adding numbers so they can be connected to reveal a recognizable shape. I had a sense of déjà vu when I read this letter. It reminds me of stories in my grandmother's autobiography. Her collection of a hundred or so memories consists mainly of disorganized recollections that lack sufficient detail and background information to render them meaningful to anyone who didn't know her well. My grandmother wrote her autobiography in 1980, not long before she died. It was the first time I'd heard of an "ordinary person" writing an autobiography. I was impressed by the fact that s...