yourpassions.tk

On September 15 I posted a message about Jeff Byers, who was in a coma following a head-on collision on September 7. On November 4, Jeff passed away, without regaining consciousness. Yesterday I learned that a dear friend's daughter — a high school classmate of my daughter, and the mother of two small girls — has a rapidly growing brain tumor with a dire prognosis measured in months. Life can change, even end, in an instant. At the risk of sounding morbid, I feel a strong urge to remind you that we don't always know how much time we have left to follow up on our intention to create a written legacy. Write now: as if this is your last chance to tell future generations things you really want them to know and remember. Don't wait another month to form this new writing habit. And/or write about your experience with sudden or unexpected deaths; about comforting others or receiving comfort. Write on, Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal

While I was digging through a drawer looking for something else, I found a treasure buried deep within: my first transistor radio, small enough to fit in a jacket pocket. The last time I specifically remember listening to it was the night of the Great Northeast Blackout , on November 9, 1965. I used this radio for updates on the chaos in Boston, where we were living at the time. I received the radio as a birthday gift five years earlier. Transistor radios were quite the hot item back then, much like iPods are today. I was dying to own one, and I was simply blown away when I found this dream gift by my plate at breakfast on my birthday, together with a charger and rechargeable 9-volt battery. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that my father told me what a strain this gift had placed on the family budget. “... but I knew you had your heart set on one, and I wanted you to have it.” I fondled the small blessing and thought back in time. Compared to now, teenagers fifty years ago had r...

How long should a story be? As long as it needs to be. I could end the blog right there. That pretty much says it all. But, you’d still be wondering what on earth that means? Is it okay for a story to be told in a single sentence? Should it fill one page? Two pages? Is twenty-nine too many? Don’t agonize over length. Each story will dictate its own length as you write. Some may run on for many pages, and others may fit in a single paragraph, like this one: My most embarrassing moment came the year after I graduated from college. I had studied German for two years, and thought I knew a few words. But one evening I attended bridge club, and the the hostess’s mother-in-law was visiting from Austria. She had helped Ossie prepare elegant pastries for dessert. I wanted to tell the woman how much I enjoyed the treats, but she didn’t speak a word of English. Calling upon my best German I said, "Das kuchen sind sehr gut." (The cakes are very good.) She looked at me, shook her head an...

“I took a class in memoir writing a few years ago and the professor told us that if we were going to be successful, we had to get up at five a.m. every morning and write for two hours. Every day. I knew I'd never do that, so I didn't even start. Is that something you advocate?” Someone in the audience asked this question during a book talk I gave recently. I swear I felt hair rising above my collar as I listened. I think she knew my answer before she finished asking. “What did he mean by successful?” I asked, thinking he may have been assuming everyone in his class aspired to publication and professional status. Not so. By success, the professor simply meant finishing what they started. By this time my clenched fists were waving away at shoulder level and my face was contorted in outrage. “ NO WAY !” I shouted. “ I absolutely do not advocate that! I don't say anyone has to do anything! Read my book, and you'll see that one of the first things I address is the importan...

You’ve probably dumped the contents of your junk drawer or its equivalent out on a table and gone through the items. You know the joy of finding forgotten objects, the surprise at some of the debris you’ve accumulated, and the lost objects you retrieve. You know the satisfaction of putting the “keepers” back in nice tidy order. After finishing the list of emotions that I wrote about last post , I feel somewhat as if I took my heart, turned it upside down over a sheet of paper, and shook out the contents for exploration. I was amazed at the quantity and variety of emotion words it holds. I sorted the initial tumble of words into alphabetical order to check for duplications and added others as Sarabelle sent them along. What I have right now is a basic array. Soon I’ll start sorting and clustering, and perhaps I’ll discover that there are only a dozen piles and that most of the words are other ways of saying similar things. The resulting list will be a gold mine as a thesaurus for prec...

Ebullient. Effervescent. Inspired. Words fly around my mind like popcorn at its climax. It all started with a writing practice challenge from Ybonesy over at Red Ravine to set a time for five minutes and write, non-stop, listing every emotion we could think of. Five minutes: now that’s a challenge I can do. I can spare five minutes. I recently bought a tiny timer to keep on my desk, mostly to prevent the pizza from burning while Sarabelle has control of my brain, but also to time freewriting exercises. When the timer beeped, I had a list of 64. I was pumped, stoked, thrilled, energized. I was also hooked. For two days now, clusters of words have sporadically popped afresh. Yesterday afternoon I dared to hope I’d top 100. Before supper I’d surpassed that goal. Then the fire flared again, and by the time I went to bed last night, the count was up to 185, and 200 seemed possible. Some nights I would have lain awake, obsessed with the search. Last night I fell asleep the minute my head h...

Sometime in the next couple of days I’ll have to venture out of my lair and into the commercial sphere. I know things will be changed. The Halloween decorations will be gone, replaced with red and green Christmas decor. It’s that time again! This brings a couple of lifestory-related thoughts to mind. One is to urge you to write about holidays past. The focus right now is on Thanksgiving and Christmas. You don’t have to write whole stories if you don’t have time, but as you think of them, jot some notes. Remember those index cards I keep harping on? Keep a few with you for this purpose. You might include a title line (which may change when the actual story is written, or not be used at all if you incorporate the memory in another story), and perhaps a few words or sentences to jump start the flow when you get back to it. Story idea lists are another option. The other thought relates to gifts. A book of your stories would make a stunning holiday gift. If you haven’t started yet, it may b...

Can you imagine letting a 25th anniversary slide by unnoticed? I almost did that yesterday, but something tickled a neuron before the clock struck twelve. This event I remembered was a milestone, marking the beginning of what has become a remarkable lifestyle change for our whole family. To put things in perspective, travel back in time with me to the evening of October 31, 1982. Immediately after supper, my husband took our older son out trick-or-treating. They only went one place, and acquiring the treat required a credit card imprint before they returned home with the loot: a single apple. This wasn’t just any old apple, it was an Apple ][+ computer, with dual external floppy disk drives, and an extra 24 K of memory. That’s right. That machine ran with a whopping 48 kilobytes of memory! The main purpose of the purchase was to allow our son to scratch his itch to learn programming languages — he’d already mastered machine language so he could create new games for his Atari. He quickl...