April Fooled?

I just noticed that I wrote and posted that prologue on April Fool's day. Maybe I was fooling myself.
I've been depressed, and depression doesn't help creativity at all.
Add to that a dash of lacking in confidence and you have a recipe for writing not getting done.
I didn't even want to write a blog entry but it's been over a week since my last one and I don't want to neglect it for about 9 months like I did last year.
Aaaaannnd,
That's all I have.
Eyup.

Swoopers and Bashers

I have a couple really bad writing habits.
One of them is editing as I go along and making too many changes as I go along.  Why risk the heartache of all that hard work being for naught if big chunks need to be edited out when the book is finished?

In my defense, Kurt Vonnegut said there are two types of writers: swoopers and bashers.  Swoopers go in like a storm and write the whole thing then make changes later.  Bashers hammer it out word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and chapter by chapter, and edit as they go along.

I guess that makes me a basher, like Kurt Vonnegut.  He said most men are bashers and most women are swoopers.  Maybe someone aught to look into that.  Anyhow, I've bashed out about 8 pages and I have a coyote hangover, but some good ideas are begining to surface. :-D

Cultural Appropriation My ASS

[Previously posted on another blog I no longer run]

In response to a "Dear White People" open letter by an angry Hispanic-American who doesn't want person's of European descent to celebrate The Day of the Dead:

everyone's entitled to my own opinion.... xD
I just wish people that have ancient traditions to celebrate would be grateful they have them and kindly climb down out out of the “white man’s” ass for a nanosecond and shift some perceptions.
I grew up as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses since age two. Being a JW means:

No Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanza
No New Years (Eve or Day)
No Easter
No Birthdays
None.
NOOOTHINGGGG!!

At Halloween we shut out the lights so no one would knock, and got TP’d by neighbors.
At Valentine’s Day (oh hell, ALL the Hallmark Conspiracy holidays!)sit awkwardly in class trying hard to be above my own embarrassment and awkwardness while everyone exchanged cards.
The never ending questions, hating, and ‘Boy I feel sorry for you” bs.

Estrangement from relatives because we didn’t go to the family holiday gatherings.

Imagine growing up in a family that has NO ROOTS.
Nothing to mark the passage of time-not even birthdays! No sweet sixteen or other coming of age. (No school dances, no after school activities)

I’m 51 now and don’t know where many of my living relatives are or how to find them. Why? I don’t know most of their last or maiden names. I can't recall many things simply from lack of exposure.  Normal exposure you'd expect to receive from your parents and extended family. The family bible I inherited had no weddings or military service recorded. No family tree filled out.

Two years ago was only my second Halloween. I had plastic stickers in the window and a plastic pumpkin wreath on my door. I’m disabled and they were a buck a piece, all I could afford. I bought a real pumpkin to carve and never did it. I put it off because I was stressed and nervous I’d do a bad job. That and lingering guilt and fear.

Thanks so much for the WalMart jab and inflatable lawn decorations.  Tacky?  Maybe.  But also none of your business.  Nothing is being taken away from you simply because someone else decided to celebrate and decorate differently than you.

How many kids in Africa died of starvation while this was typed do you think?

When I pass our four cockatiels on my way to the bathroom, they hiss at peck at EACH OTHER. Why? Because I’m too big to mess with.
And this is all people do.
We can’t fight an economy. Maybe if we all had private little caves in Tibet, but for now all we have is each other and we’re all blowing it over shallow and pedantic bullshit like “don’t do what I do and don’t wear what I wear”

I’m English, Irish, Scottish, Italian, French, “Cajun” Seminole and Cherokee. So, who am I supposed to not culturally appropriate? My blood was colonized and appropriated long, long ago. Many nations war in MY blood, you think?

Get a gentle perspective, light a candle, and pray for all those JW kids who have no family or national traditions to root them to the brotherhood of Life.

How Dry I Am

Me and my big mouth.  Here I had to shoot my mouth off about writing a book and I can't conjure up more than three pages so far.  I keep asking myself, "How in the HELL are you going to churn out something novel sized from this?"

I decided I really suck at writing descriptions of scenery unless it's to set a dramatic scene.  I have a difficult time writing about the nondescript hospital waiting rooms, different types of trees, whether or not there are hills, etc. 

But for something to be a book it has to have 'filler'.  It's not all action, inner dialogue and dialogue.  It's a lot easier when there's a writing buddy, like a role play.

Guess I'm just spoiled. 

I've spent the last few days reading an old role play from four or so years ago and I'm feeling very nostalgic.  I'm also wondering how I can ever live up to that again.  It was some of my best writing!  My main character was pretty stereotypical in many ways but then he'd turn around and do something surprising.  Then there was the creepy character who was fun to write and had different dimensions.  I was going to use them for this 'book' I'm trying to write but I've changed my mind.  I'm saving them for something better and renaming the current characters.  It wouldn't be like Zack to be annoyed and callous about a body on the side of the road anyhow.

Sneak Peek!

I decided to post my book prologue since I'm too damn excited to keep it under wraps.  It's just the prologue.

My working title is Rope A Dope, lol.

     Rope a Dope

  

     Nothing about this day was right.  He’d like to say it’d been wrong from sunrise to sunset but that would imply sunshine, and it’d rained all blessed day.  The windshield wipers squeaked like a couple on a cheap mattress and the low beams on his red Dodge Ram truck were still too high; they refracted off the raindrops like tiny mirrors, making night vision near impossible.  He scanned through the channels but the  radio stations played nothing but static so far out in such bad weather.  He couldn’t even find a decent AM station to check on road conditions.  Oh well, he could see that much outside his damn window. 

   Zack  was so distracted by the deplorable  driving conditions that he nearly missed seeing the crumpled heap on the side of the road
     Almost
     “What in the name of…” he mused aloud.  The heap was human shaped; he’d have to stop and help.  Zack groaned and swore under his breath as he pulled his truck off the road and onto the muddy shoulder.  He mashed the black Stetson onto his head, opened the door and hopped out to perform his duty of human decency.  He was soaked inside out before he was halfway there and could only imagine the pitiful shape this person must be in.  Which begged the question, “Just what shape is this person in?” he wondered.  Well, he’d find out soon enough. 

     A woman.  A woman lay there in the mud and rain.  He hunkered and felt for a pulse.  He couldn’t find one and knew he wouldn’t.  This woman was dead as a doornail and probably had been for quite some time.  She was cold and rigor mortis had begun to set in.  It disgusted him to think of all the people who must have passed her up, just going on their merry way to engage with life.  Was he the only decent human left in this town?  It made him shiver to imagine all the people he knew in town who took this road.  Good people. Civic minded people.  Or so he thought.  Then again, someone may have dumped her here pretty recently. Who could say?  Not him.  He walked back to his truck and fetched his flashlight from the glove compartment hoping to find a purse or other identification.

                                                   ~°~°~°~

     He grimaced as he riffled through the dead woman’s pockets to search for a wallet or cell phone.  Nothing turned up on her body at all.  His flashlight failed to turn anything up around her as well.  It was just rain, mud, and a dead woman in a plain t-shirt and yoga pants.  She didn’t even have shoes on for God’s sake.  He was no crime scene investigator but it didn’t take a genius to see that someone had strangled her.  Well, he’d done his part, he’d have to go back and fetch Gabe, the sheriff.  His cell phone got no signal this far out regardless of the weather. 

     As it turned out, he was spared the trouble; the automobile that crested the small hill was Gabe.  He pulled behind Zack’s truck and got out.  “What we got here, Zack?”

     “Come see for yourself.  I only just now found her.” He said, almost defensively.

    Gabe Cleghorn walked up, stood there arms akimbo and looked down at the woman, then at his cousin Zack, then back to the body.

    “Well shit.” He said.