blogging

Your Dysfunctional Family in Ten Words


I found this on Sunshine’s blog a while ago and am just getting around to sharing it.

“… trying to talk about your dysfunctional family in 10 words.”

It reminded me of the six word autobiography only one that focuses on one’s beginnings as well as adult-hoods. Our families, right or wrong, are the earliest and most insidious influences.

Ten Words wouldn’t do justice to most people’s humble beginnings but it probably keeps most of us from embellishing or ducking personal responsibility.

This was mine:

Survived Parents. Escaped.

Loneliness.

Love.

Loneliness.

Happiness/Love. Fingers crossed.

Kind of like the “poemyness” of it.

Anyone else care to have a go?

The State of the Writing


I have been working on Night Dogs as my primary fiction piece. It’s coming along slowly now. This seems to be the way of storytelling. An idea appears, details gel and I write like gangbusters and then it slows as the story starts to demand sturdier legs to stand on. However, this is probably the best story of this length I have ever written and I know it has novel potential. My goal is to finish it in May and workshop it via a writing course I am going to be taking at the university this June.

Which leaves my regular readers wondering about the memoir? Well, maybe you aren’t. I haven’t forgotten it. Ideas about what to do with the rough draft swirl, recede before morphing into something tangible.

It’s hard to pick up again because it was hard to write. Deliberately picking at emotional scars is not my idea of something that is good for a person, but I want to finish it. It’s just not going to be quite the memoir it started out to be.

I have come to realize that the story of my loss and widowhood is not a story that would strike a cord with too many people. And, that the loss was not mine. It was Will’s loss. He died. Too young and too horrifically. All I lost was the option to live a life I thought I was supposed to live, however, that life was never mine to live. It was not a part of the great overall scheme of things for me. My loss was insignificant compared to his.

No, the story is in accepting and rebuilding because how many people really and truly do that?

And it’s Rob’s story too, so I have been in semi-discussions with him about writing his story as it overlaps with mine. He is warming to the idea, but regardless, we wouldn’t start on it until summer. So that is where that is.

I continue fitfully at 50 Something Moms. I have two short works I want to finish this spring that have promise, and then there are the boxes in the basement with half-finished or simply outlines ideas that I need to go through.

And thus I end my state of the writing address, dear readers.

Tweeting


I think I am sorta enjoying myself even though I still feel like I am flying on a couch on the Lido deck of the Axiom. I really have no idea what I am doing. Micro-blogging? Annoying people?

It’s different than Facebook. On Facebook I can see others interacting and feel actively left out whereas on Twitter, I only read those I follow when they decide to tweet and not the replies of others to them. Of course this enhances the girl in the bubble thing but lessens the red-headed stepchild feeling.

I am learning the protocol which is in a state of mushrooming evolution from all appearances. It’s like being an anthropologist among a newly discovered tribe in a previously hidden culture. Fascinating, as Spock would say.

I know now that there are people who collect other tweeters like my daughter collects rocks. In fact she discovered her first rock of the season and washed it off for display just yesterday. We will soon have a pile in a corner by the door and that is how some people approach “following” on Twitter. People are collected and “followed” although it just can not be possible to “follow” hundreds or thousands of tweeters. 

Some Tweeties don’t pretend they are there for anything other than pimping themselves. For example @KellyRipa of Regis and Kelly has nearly 80,000 followers and she follows absolutely no one. Someone needs to explain the “social” part of social media to her.

There are other celebs too. I mentioned Demi and AnaMarie the other day, but John Mayer had this to announce to Tweetland recently,

johnmayer1

Now there is something you can’t scrub from the mind’s eye easily.

But there are a lot of writers and editors who are interesting and fun to follow, and for the most part, everyone I follow who follows me back will interact with me, and have been helpful and polite. For example, Guy Kawasaki, the AllTop guy, sent me a direct tweet with instructions for setting up my page there and followed it up with his cell number in case I needed to talk to him. Very, very cool.

I don’t know in the end if it will be much of a networking tool. It’s like Facebook in that it is mostly about accessing people you’d have never known otherwise due to geography or the social strata that makes up our world.

I am thinking I might try to do a little flash fiction though. What do you think? Anyone game?

More on the Twitter Experiment as it progresses.