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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.

It is Friday Afterall


So here is the weekly update.

I continue to Twitter and find it more dull than not. It’s like being at a party where everyone is talking, unaware that no one is listening. Because no one is listening, honest. There are the celebs and twitterati who have thousands of followers they never bother to interact with – probably because there is no possible way to have tens or hundreds of thousands of “friends” – but more likely it is about the status having massive followings brings. Followers equal importance in the Twitsphere.

But I go along acquiring followers – the majority of whom I know from some other web venue – and follow them and a couple of others who seem interesting for the moment. I am letting Demi Moore go however. By all appearances, she tweets without guile, but I dislike following people who I don’t interact with. It just has a creepy vibe to it. Ana Marie Cox will likely be history soon for the same reason. Interesting but only there to be seen. Not interact. Which makes sense because she is a journalist, but it changes the aura of the place when it’s used as a means to an end only. A person can promote themselves, ideas, causes – whatever – without “talking” at people, can’t they? 

I guess it gets back to the difficulty I have with social media in general. It’s one way.

My piece yesterday on Natasha Richardson was a “hit”. I find that interesting because I was just reading a web post on blogging and the importance of nurturing your blog’s “pillars”. Writing about death, grief and myself are certainly pillars here and those posts are the most read over time. I guess I need to tend to those topics more.

Spring Break is coming up and this means we will be heading up into the mountains soon. Rob’s nephew, courtesy of Shelley, is getting married on the 28th. The bride and groom are exchanging vows in a small, private, ceremony atop a snow covered peak. The wedding party will be traveling up and back via helicopter and a dinner and reception dance will follow. We are caravaning with the older girls a day earlier and hopefully there won’t be any snow and the avalanche threat will be low.

I debated on going. I still would rather not go anywhere for break. I am tired of long road trips still. But there is a level of anticipation among the older girls because this is the first family gathering in several years that is not death related. I think that the first wedding of a grandchild is probably fraught even with unrealistic expectations as it is, but as I told Rob, I don’t think anyone is thinking about how hard it’s going to be to attend a wedding that so many people are missing due to being dead.

People tend to be on better behavior at funerals because of the solemnity, but weddings can be free-for-alls emotionally speaking because there isn’t the same expectation of bad feelings coming up. Throw in alcohol and things could be quite interesting.

But I am going. Minimally enthusiastic – because I don’t like alcohol fueled events – but with an open mind. 

Afterwards we are heading over to Penticton for a couple of days and then hauling for home because I have that workshop on the 4th. Which is mostly done but for practicing. I went through the outline with my writing group the other night and they really liked what I had put together. Been a while since I have put together a “lesson plan” but I am pleased.

Okay, I am done. Maybe I will update on the weekend a bit more. Otherwise, look for me on Twitter. I am toying with the idea of writing a twitter fic short. They write novels for cellphones afterall.