The blogs are organized by date.
Comments will appear when we've had time to check them. Apology for the inconvenience, but it's a way to keep phishers and spammers off the page.
I made it a point to talk with a friend at least once every day, to avoid being to insulated.
And my friends put a lot of effort into keeping me in touch with humanity.
For most of last week, this was easy. My mom and sister arrived on Tuesday evening and stayed until Friday morning.
This was good timing. I really needed the week mostly alone (I talked with at least one person every day), but late at night, this big old house gets lonely, and having them here helped that. My sister also helped clean out some stuff and organize other stuffs that I wasn't quite ready to deal with.
I received Carol's ashes and death certificates on Wed. My mom went with me to pick them up. The funeral home I chose delivers inside Washtenaw County, but I didn't want to make them brave my dirt roads, so we met their van at the intersection of US23 and N. Territorial.
On Thursday, I had a zoom writer's critique meeting, and abandoned my mom and sister to a couple DVD movies. Like most of my critique groups, we laughed and told stories almost as much as we critiqued and commented.
The less boring part of life has been pets, and misbehavior thereof.
The two cats have started marking. I've caught each of them a couple times over the past week. My mom says that when my dad died our old cat did that for several months.
Several Months. Oh joy.
Mere words do not express how this thrills me. On Saturday, I spent a few hours at a local Sci-Fi convention. I had a good time chatting with old friends, getting hugs, and attended a writing lecture by Jody Lynn Nye.
The official topic was Pacing, but she meandered a bunch through other topics like characterization and description. It was a very content-rich session, and I wish I could remember everything she said. Along with being a fairly prolific author, she teaches workshops at DragonCon. For the local con, she did 4 one-hour talks, of which I caught one.
A few comments of hers, that came up in other discussions recently.
1) All rules can be broken, but you need to do it well.
2) First chapter (or scene in a short story) needs to give the reader a time/place, a character, and a situation. The reader needs to be grounded before you take them for a ride.
3) A critical sin is giving the reader nothing but questions to open the story. If you want to hook them, you've got to give them something to chew on.
4) One of the most common issues she sees with beginning writers is that they see the scene in their head, and don't put enough details onto the paper. This is one of my big problems - lack of description. I can see this room, why can't you?
5) She mentioned at one of her workshops, almost a third of the attendees provided stories where the protagonist was never named. She passed all the stories around, and the authors all saw that the *OTHER* writers neglected to give the main character a name, and then realized they'd done the same thing.
And, back to pets.