For some reason...

I am excited by the beginning of a new year.  It may be because I spent a lot of months during 2012 down in the dumps - whether I was willing to admit it to myself or anyone else - but there you have it.  I've let go of a bunch of old baggage over the past couple of months and well, I feel happier than I have in a long time.  Truly happy.  Less worried about life.  More interested in living and trying new things outside the cocoon of my carefully self-regulated comfort zone.  Tom & Al brought me some cookies (and a lovely gift) just before Christmas, along with this lovely wall decal quote by Emily Dickinson: Dwell in possibilities.  I love it.  I've always loved Emily, mildly depressed spinster poet that she was - and I love these words.  I hung it right where I can see if from my desk.  A timely reminder.

Thanks, guys - I appreciate your thoughtfulness more than I can say.

I'm also excited about my new Jane-a-Day journal.  Jane Austen, another favorite kindred spirit (and spinster, I might add), is the inspiration for this five-year journal, which has an quote from one of her works on each page.  It was a lovely Christmas gift from my friend, Marie, and I am looking forward to daily inspiration from Jane's timeless witticisms. I only hope my comments are as witty.

Thank you, Marie, for thinking of me.

I am looking forward to a happy 2013 - a year in which I vow to speak less and listen more, read fewer books and finish writing one of my own.

And this year, I choose happiness.

I haven't fallen...

off the face of the earth - yet.  It's just summer.  And it's hot.  Really hot and humid - and who feels like doing anything much in that sort of weather?  I've been working, reading, clearing out closets, reading a little more, getting rid of stuff I haven't used in forever, reading - and well, you get the picture.  Since I finished up reading M.C. Beaton's Agatha Raisin series, I started in on Hamish MacBeth.  I've read the first eight - but I'm waiting on the ninth book, which is on its way from a used bookstore somewhere in the UK.  Any day now, I keep telling Aggie and Pete.  In the meantime, I've been tidying and rearranging stuff.  I used to be a mad furniture mover in my previous life (and home).  It was much easier with wood and tile floors - not so much with carpet.  And I somehow seem to have lost my former ability to move heavy objects single handedly.  I am not sure when that happened.  At any rate, I now content myself with rearranging stuff: the shelves, the kitchen counter, my desk.  Incentive to dust the place every now and then.  I was also hoping that messing around with my stuff would be good therapy for writer's block.

Not yet - but I am hoping for a breakthrough soon.

Back to Piney Point...

and it's about time, isn't it?  I was doing great, diligently writing a new chapter every day when I started on January first, but then tax season arrived and something had to give.  Unfortunately, it was the new adventures of my amateur detective, her hunky husband and their precocious offspring that got put on hold temporarily while I spent the next several months doing paying meaningful work.  I'm finally all caught up, the spring summer cleaning is done and I am determined to get back on my chapter-a-day schedule.  My goal is a finished mystery by the end of August and with any luck, a free Kindle download for Dead and Dug Up on Amazon by the first of October.  Apparently, digital is the new wave of publishing for emerging writers - no agent necessary.  We'll see how this goes...  If you've been waiting with bated (yes, bated - not baited) breath for a new installment of Dead and Dug Up, check back later this evening on my Piney Point blog for the latest chapter.

Where did June go?

That's the question I've been asking myself all day today - and what did I accomplish this month?  On the surface it doesn't look like I did much, but I am all caught up on the bookkeeping I let slide during tax season, the spring cleaning is done (yes, I know it's summer...) and I finished my photo scanning project.  So I have been working hard, just not working very hard at blogging or writing.

Which I plan to begin again in earnest - tomorrow.

I've also spent my evenings reading.  I discovered M.C. Beaton and her Agatha Raisin mystery series.  And her Hamish MacBeth mystery series.  Very Agatha Christie in style and substance.  I like them both very much - the only problem is that I am waiting on Agatha Raisin book number nine - I found a used copy for cheap - and the postal service keeps disappointing me!  I've read some Hamish MacBeth in the meantime; his adventures can be read out of order without too much disruption to the continuing story line.  I'd download the Kindle version, but it really irritates me off that the digital edition is often more expensive than the paperback.  I've been getting the paperback versions because then I can share with my book buddies.  I know that defeats the purpose of digital books and saving trees and all that, but what can I say?  I'm an avid reader, but I'm also a cheapskate!

Something has been bugging me...

lately and well, it's time to vent.  And please bear in mind that I mean this in the nicest possible way...  I'm tired of reading plagiarized blogs.  There, I said it.  I know that the prevailing public opinion is that bloggers are a bunch of self-promoting narcissists.  There may be a grain or two of truth in that statement, but if you're going to be a self-promoting narcissist, at least be an original one.  I follow a few blogs religiously, and do you know why I enjoy them?  These bloggers write about their lives - their uncensored, original lives - and their writing is uniquely original.  I'll admit, the English major in me finds a couple of them not terribly well written and one is actually intensely boring, but I appreciate the content because it is entirely original thought.  But others, well - if you have nothing to say, don't copy an article from some fluff women's magazine and paste it into your blog.  This type of blogging happens quite frequently - haven't people ever heard of attribution?  A copied post is blatantly obvious; originality is, at the very least, the art of concealing one's sources.  I saw this print on Etsy and loved the Melville quote:  It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.  

I'm getting off my blogging soapbox now.

Laughter really is the best...

medicine!  I nearly laughed myself unconscious today while I was writing.  I know, that sounds weird, but I wrote some stuff that just struck me as so funny, I couldn't stop laughing.  I'm sure my upstairs neighbor thought I'd gone round the bend, but I don't really care.  The more I wrote and then the more I re-read and edited the couple of paragraphs that had sent me into hysterics, the more I laughed.  I seriously could not stop - and at the point when I started to feel light-headed, I had to get up and go in the other room.  Aggie and Peter are used to brief periods of hilarity at our house, so they didn't pay much attention to me.  I suppose if I dropped over dead on the floor, they'd think nothing of it and just eat my cheeks.  I think e.e. cummings would agree that my day today wasn't wasted at all.

Cats, burning candles and finding your calling...

I know it's sort of silly, but I really like burning scented candles.  For a long time I couldn't burn candles at home because of our herd of overly inquisitive cats.  I couldn't even put a candle in one of those warmers that just melts the wax to release the scent.  I came home one day to find red candle wax all over the wall and poor George's front paws encased in the stuff.  It took a while to get George clean and he wasn't happy about it.  No more candles for me.  I took advantage of being able to enjoy them at the office where Peter was completely oblivious.  He still shows absolutely no interest in a candle at all - and so I am happy to have not only a vanilla candle in the warmer tucked away on the living room bookshelf, but a candle actually burning on my desk for most of the day.  It doesn't take much to please me; I'm simple that way.

Which is not to say that I don't miss the all of the cats, because I do.  Terribly - so much so sometimes that I can hardly bear to think about them and where they all might be now.  These are my grey twinkie boys: Walter Kroncat and Charles Kuralt.  I know that Tim's cat lady friend found a home for Charley, but the last I knew, Walter was still at the farm living in the cow barn with his sister Lucie Bee, Louis XII, Sophie, Ernest Hemingway and my sixteen-year-old Eddie, aka Edward R. Murrow.  I love them all and I hope they know that - but life changes sometimes and there is nothing we can do about it.  It wasn't my decision to split them up and give them away - but I also know that I assign human emotions to them when I am rational enough to know that they are animals and have most likely forgotten all about me.

It doesn't make it hurt any less.

And when life doesn't turn out the way we have hoped it would, we find other ways to occupy our time.  At least I have - and I may have finally found - or rediscovered - my calling.  I recently read that the things we do while we are procrastinating to keep from working are probably the things we are really meant to be doing all along.  The writer of the original thought put it much more eloquently - but that's the gist of it.  I write when I should be working - and I've always dreamed of writing for a living.  For years I've written and edited and torn up my work.  I've started and stopped and started again.  I finally decided over the past couple of weeks that the only way I would ever find out if I could really write fiction was to just throw my words out to the universe and see if anyone bothered to read them.  I've challenged myself to write my first real mystery one day at a time - a chapter at a time for a small but hopefully growing audience.  If my readers want to know how the story ends, then I'll have to write it.  If they hate it, well - that's fine, too.  At least I will have finished the story.  I found this funny photograph today of me with my first typewriter; I must have been about six.  My sister looks stunned - I'm not sure why.  But I was having a good time.  Maybe I knew what my calling was back then - and I somehow lost sight of it along the way.  I've graduated to more sophisticated writing tools over the years, but I'm hoping to rediscover the joy of story-telling.

Join me in Piney Point...

for the original murder mystery I'm serializing on my new blog, Piney Point, Alabama .  The first mystery in the series is called Dead and Dug Up.  I hope you'll check out the misadventures of my amateur sleuth and her crazy Southern family.  I'd love to hear your feedback!

Slob...

I got a letter from my college roommate, Anne, today.  She sent me a funny clipping and asked me to send her a copy of a English paper I wrote during our freshman year.  My professor loved it - he gave me an A+ - with the following notation: In a stack of very serious papers from a group of very serious freshman, I was pleasantly surprised with your essay.  I look forward to reading more of your work.  Of course, his kind comments haven't spurred me on much over the years, but one day...  I wonder if publishers take into account that a writer got an A+ in her freshman English composition class?  At any rate, re-reading my essay, I thought it really was pretty good, after all, and I thought I'd share.  By the way, Consumer Reports has nothing to say with regard to unhygienic eleven-year-olds.

SLOB
(written in the fall of 1976)

Once or twice a year, my 11 year-old cousin Lester comes to visit, and it's like entertaining the skunk works. Mom says that Lester is simply a typically untidy 11 year-old, but I say he's a slovenly slob who ought to know better. Lester, I firmly believe, wears the same pair of socks from January to June and the only thing he doesn't eat with his fingers is soup. The real corker, though, is that when you criticize old Les, he starts reciting the books of the Bible backwards, like he's so holy you can't touch him or anything. Aunt Agatha paid him 50¢ to learn to do it, and now you can’t shut him up.

This time, I said to myself when he arrived for week’s stay, I am going to get Lester into the bathtub if it's the last thing I ever do.

First, I bought him a bar of soap that looked like a baseball and washcloth shaped like a catcher's mitt. I told him that it was a gift from me and suggested that he use it. He promptly took them both outside to play catch and lost the soap in the bushes. Next I gave him a book of mystery stories and suggested that he relax in a tub of hot water and read it. An hour later, he emerged from a dry tub where he had camped out on the sofa cushions with a box of crackers and a jar of peanut butter. In desperation I offered him a dollar to take a bath, but he offered me five bucks to lay off.

There was only one thing left to do. As I was carrying a pitcher of lemonade out to the pool, I tripped over Lester’s feet and spilled it all over him. He began screaming and yelling and Mom came running out.

“Lester, darling! What in the world?”

“She did it on purpose,” Lester bawled, while Mom glared at me.

I didn't answer. I'd suffer the consequences no matter what if it would only get Lester into the bathtub. But I didn't know old Les. He spent the rest of the afternoon on the patio, licking lemonade off his arms and legs like some senile old dog. All during the rest of his visit, he stuck to everything he sat on. Even worse, the flies swarmed about his marinated clothes and I wanted to puke whenever I heard him coming. The only pleasure I got out of it was following him around with a fly swatter and whacking him every time he said, “Revelation, Third John, Second John, First John. . . “

I've always wondered...

about this: if the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, what is the road to Heaven paved with?  I've probably had enough good intentions to pave the road to Hades and back about a dozen times so far - maybe I'm destined to be CEO of this company!  Of course, my good intentions this week included catching up on my blog posts, but I haven't done that and now the weekend is upon me.  So many books, so little time...  I just downloaded about eight free Kindle books and I pretty much have my weekend mapped out - and then I looked at my list and blog catch-up is right there at the top.  It might not seem like a big deal, but blogging is something I've been doing for me; it makes me think positive thoughts (most of the time) and it makes me take time to write - even if it's just a paragraph or two.  One of my resolutions way back in January was to blog every day this year - and well, tax season got in the way.  I have about three months worth of half-written blog posts - ideas whose time probably came and went, but those paragraphs matter to me.  The new books will still be on my Kindle next weekend.  Time to rethink my plans...

Oh - and I really want one of those three-wheel bicycles!

Still alive and...

Well, I'm trying to catch up.  I'm not complaining - after the past couple of years, too much work is a blessing and I am very, very thankful.  Two of my favorite people were here today - and just spending time chatting with them about life, family, their work and yes - taxes - made me realize how much I've missed being creative on a daily basis.  It's been months since I made a card - and even longer since I sat down at my sewing machine.  Denise is an amazing and creative seamstress - and she always inspires me to take up my needle and thread.  Jill is a seriously great card designer and I am always so thrilled when she makes a card just for me.  One of my biggest creative outlets over the past couple of years has been blogging - and the very act of writing something positive every day has helped me resist the urge to over-edit my work and just write.  And I have missed the daily exercise of writing so much this past month - despite the fact that I've taken a minute or two to jot down an idea every day.  So please bear with me - if anyone out there is still reading! - while I catch up a few days at a time.  I started blogging just for me - and I am truly amazed that anyone finds what I write even remotely interesting enough to choose to follow along.  Life is good - and I have some really funny stuff on my list to write about, so stay tuned...

I've been having...

one of those months so far...  It seems like December first came around and I lost all of my holiday spirit and momentum and I am just now finally catching up.  You'll probably notice that a bunch of posts appeared on my blog almost all at once - and I've just about got all of the Christmas decorations exactly where I want them - only to take them down and put them away in about three weeks.  The holiday season has been hard for me the past couple of years and I was feeling more festive this year - for about a minute.  And then the aloneness and worry crept in and I ended up moving a couple of squares back.  Actually, I don't even know what square I started out on, but at least I'm not back at Square One, wherever that is.  I've been working on some client projects that I need to finish by the first of the year and so I've been fortunate to keep my mind and hands busy.  Too much time to think is my worst enemy.  Playing with my new e-reader gadget has cheered me up immensely - and so has getting caught up on my blog.  This is something I've done mainly for me - to improve my writing and to share something positive every day and it has been one constant that has kept me going over the last eighteen months or so.  I've met some lovely people and made some new friends - and I am very grateful for that opportunity.  I'm also encouraged that people do like to read what I write and that it's not just my friends being nice when they say how hilarious my stories can be.  So I'm caught up and moving on toward the next square and a bright new year.  Now if I can just find a place for that antique table...

Does anyone else...

have global appeal?  Seriously, I keep getting comments from someone in this part of the world and I have absolutely no idea what they are saying.  They are all from the same person - I need a translator!  Here's the latest one:

耐心是一株很苦的植物，但果實卻很甜美

It could say "I like what you have to say" or

"You write like crap."  It's anybody's guess.

I found...

Tim's old laptop computer on the shelf in the back room at the office and amazingly, it still works! I installed my WordPerfect Office software on it and I am going to take it home with me so I can write at night. Since I had the cable disconnected, I've been reading, doing crosswords and watching an occasional DVD - but I decided that I'd probably get more written on my great American novel if I typed it instead of writing longhand. And, I should probably admit, I installed my Scrabble software on the laptop, too. Aggie and Monty aren't much on playing games - especially Scrabble.

The other night we watched Down With Love, a cute romantic comedy with Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor. Of course, I kept thinking Bridget Jones meets young ObiWan Kenobi - but that's just me. It was okay, but I prefer the old Rock Hudson and Doris Day movies. Last night after our gourmet dinner of Eggo waffles with peanut butter, the dogs and I watched Connie and Carla - which was actually quite funny. I mean, how can any movie with drag queens not be funny? I loved To Wong Foo, and while Patrick Swayze and John Leguizamo made great women, Wesley Snipes needs to stick to being a man. Flawless, with Robert DeNiro and Philip Seymour Hoffman, is another great drag queen movie. Funny, great story and definitely worth checking out if you've never seen it. I was also glad that someone finally decided to educate the masses about where the term drag came from: it originated with Shakespeare. If you've seen Shakespeare in Love, or just studied his work, you know that women did not appear in the theatre and all of the parts were played by men. In the stage direction for his work, Shakespeare would note that a character would enter "dressed as girl" and hence the term drag evolved. Just another UBI (useless bit of information), but I was surprised when one of the queens in Connie and Carla explained the term to one of his friends.