Rantings and Ravings of an Insane Writer

Did you miss out on How To Think Sideways or How To Revise Your Novel when sign-ups were open?  Weren’t ready to take either class when it was offered?  You have another chance for either class.  Holly has opened both, and there’s no waiting.  Sign up and begin your class today if you want.  Click on either link above or below and right in the sidebar to get more information and sign up.  Those are my affiliate links, and all proceeds from anyone who signs up through my link go to support Forward Motion, an on line writing community that’s free to use (small donations are appreciated if you like and use the site).

I have taken HTTS, and I found it very helpful.  I’m currently taking HTRYN, and I’m also finding it helpful, but some people might think I’m going pretty slow.  I started in November or December, and I’m still on the third lesson.  I’m plugging along, though.  Anything that helps me revise a novel and improve it has to be better than what I’m doing, and I’m convinced I could make this novel better even if I never finished the course (but I’m going to finish the course — think how much better it can be then!).

I attended InnoTech San Antonio today.  I haven’t been to a technology conference for a couple of years, and I wanted to see how much I was missing.  I felt pretty comfortable, but I’d thought I might see more of my former military colleagues (either military or civilian).  I ran into one.  I saw lots of local business attendees and conversed with one or two.  I attended a couple of social media seminars.  I knew most of what was presented, but I was happy to meet one of the presenters.

In addition to seminars, the exhibits are usually the best, and I enjoyed those conversations.  For so many years, I had to focus my attention on technology applications I could use for the Air Force.  Today, I could focus on anything that might be useful for me personally.  I attended as the owner of Mercury Ranch, so I had the opportunity to explain what we’re planning to do with that.  I did find some companies that might be helpful for things we need to do with it — assuming we can decide how we want to implement our plans.

I was pretty excited about Sprint’s 4G/3G wireless hot spot, but, sadly, when I got home and checked coverage, Sprint is only available in Roaming mode in our Central Texas location.  We could get great coverage here in San Antonio, which is part of my plan.  Verizon claims to have full 3G coverage in our Central Texas location, and they have a beautiful MiFi wireless hotspot.  I also confirmed ATT is not aware of an impending wireless hot spot release, so when the contract is up in September, I’ll be moving my cellular data modem business to a company that offers a wireless hotspot for up to five simultaneous connections.  At this time, it looks like that company will be Verizon.

If you primarily operate near interstate corridors and need a wireless hot spot, check out Sprint’s 4G/3G unit — it costs the same as the straight 3G modems.  An added bonus is unlimited 4G connect time, and 3G is the usual 5G per month.  The modem is fully configurable.  It’s about the size of a large square drink coaster.

It was a pretty good day.

I was puttering around, minding my own business.  I trolled through my Bloglines feed and pulled up Tech’s 51313 Harbor Street.  I’m behind on reading.  I was out of town over the weekend, but in the back of my mind, I knew he’d written two new posts in the last week titled “Belief” and “Faith.”  I hadn’t read them yet, but when he posted “Friendship” today and talked about Gail and the wonderful friend she’d been for him through the years, calling attention to her comment on his “Belief” post, I was doing some scrambling to catch up.

Please read the whole post and comment here, but this is what slapped me upside the head and prompted this post:

No one’s life turns out just like they thought it would, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good life. And there are so many conditions of happiness available in the right here and now. You don’t have to run to the future to find them. Don’t sacrifice the present for the future or by getting stuck in the past. The present is all we really have and we need to make the most of it.

See, I spent much of my teen years longing for The Future.  Things would be so much better then.  That’s when things would really happen.  (Yes, they did, but how much did I squander?) Thankfully, I’m not too big on being stuck in The Past.  Sure, I wonder what it would have been like to finish college where I began in a traditional way, but that wasn’t going to happen for me.  Mostly because of my attitude.  My attitude has been a problem most of my life, but I’ve managed to be moderately successful (by my definition) in spite of it.  In fact, my problem may be that I think I’ve forgotten more of my past than I ever knew.  Does that mean I can make stuff up now?

But seriously.  My hubby spent four years in the Air Force more than fifty years ago, and he constantly reminisces about things that happened to him and things he did back then.  I spent twenty-eight years in the Air Force, and I haven’t found much reason to remember too many stories from that time of my life, which, incidentally, comprises my entire adult life except for the last year and a half, plus the year I spent at Ohio State and the nearly a year I spent making toy drums in Massachusetts before entering the Air Force (three and a three-quarter years, if you’re keeping track at home).

I doubt too many people are too interested in the Ohio State Traying Team (using dining hall trays do slide down snowbanks) or stretching our phone handset cords to the doors of our room and talking face to face to our suitemates (in the age of cell phones, isn’t that quaint?).  Ditto for slicing my right index finger with a piece of sheet metal at the drum factory or hauling the porta-potty in to work to dump it because I didn’t have indoor plumbing for several months while I embraced the joys of living in a cabin in the woods while earning minimum wage making toy drums.  Yeah, I’ve laughed about those days, but I doubt too many people are interested, and, frankly, other than making sure I remember how tough it can be to make ends meet, I’m not wild about reliving those days.

The Future still entices me, even though I’m not certain how exciting it will be.  It holds fascinating possibilities, but my challenge is to live in The Present, which brings me to why Gail’s quote inspired me.

It’s probably nothing to you, but until I read Gail’s comment, I had never superimposed the meaning of the words “present” and “present.”  One word means “the here and now” and the other means “a gift.”  Then I realized The Present is a present we open anew every single day of our lives.  What we do with that present makes all the difference.  You can’t save it.  It’s perishable.

What are you going to do with your Present when you roll out of bed tomorrow morning?  And the morning after that?  It’s precious and special.  Just for you.  Enjoy it.

The roofers arrived right on time this morning to begin re-roofing the shop.  This daunting task will cost almost as much as buying the building, but it has to be done.  Without a roof we can trust, well, the building doesn’t matter.

We still have lots more work to do, but I think our next major project will be to finish clearing the overgrowth from behind  the building.  Drainage is a problem, and water seeps through the wall.  We have dirt about a  foot and a half deep across the back of the building to haul out  once we can gain access through the overgrowth, then we plan to brick the ground area and ensure water drains away from the building.

After those two critical tasks, we have three other outside jobs to do on the structure.  We have some reworking to do on some of the glass panels and vents on our beautiful industrial skylights.  We have to rework how the front awning (not original to the building but nice to have) hangs from the building.  We also have significant glass and window casing work on the side and back windows.  We have temporarily hung plastic sheeting over most of the broken panes, and that made a huge difference in stopping wind from blowing into the building.

Inside?  Well, the cleaning continues.  Do you know what really old, water damaged linoleum looks like?

This picture doesn’t do it justice.  It crumbles.  I guess to make showrooms for the furniture, much of the floor was covered in different areas of linoleum.  Age and water damage (that seepage problem I mentioned above) has resulted in a real mess inside.  We’ve been sweeping and breaking up the big pieces and putting them in five gallon buckets.  The linoleum disintegrates into small pieces which will work into the sand at the ranch to enhance our roadbed, so everything has a use.

We were working yesterday to prepare a place inside the back door for the gravel  that comes off the roof (we’ll reuse that, too), and I was putting like things with like things, and I compared it to Sesame Street.  Remember the old song, “One of these things is not like the other?”  We made piles for wood, glass, and linoleum.  We also added more bedrails to the monstrous collection we’ve already gathered.  And, of course, we’ve filled several five gallon buckets with nice, fine dirt.  I guess that’s what you get when you don’t dust a place for thirty years.

One other combination indoor outdoor task we have to do is peek behind the covering put over the upper windows in the front of the building.  If those windows are intact, we plan to take the covering off to expose those windows and bring more light, and, possibly, ventilation, to the building.  We have shades to put over them to repel heat, but we’d like the old-fashioned windows to be visible again — assuming they’re not broken or unrepairable.

Cell phone reception in the Central Texas house is iffy at best.  We’re about a block outside the range of really good ATT Edge service (to get 3G, we have to be closer to Temple).  Inside the house, the house structure tends to make reception spotty.  Since we get free cell to cell coverage, hubby and I usually converse with the cell phones when he’s in SA and I’m here (or vice versa).  But, too often, the call drops or we can’t hear one another.

I have a Bluetooth wireless earpiece.  I rarely use it unless I’m driving.  This week, something clicked.  There are a few places in the house with good bars.  Why don’t I leave the phone in one of those places and activate the earpiece and wear it?

Works like a charm.  Hubby called several times this week while I was employing this technique, and not once did we go through the, “Hello?  Hello?  Can you hear me?  Are you there?” routine.  We actually had pleasant conversations not overshadowed by, “Would you repeat that?  What?  What?  I’m sorry, I can’t hear you again.”  I won’t go so far as to say this saved our marriage (we’ve decided we’re stuck with each other no matter what — oh, that’s what the marriage vows said?  Well, there you have it.), but it made for a much more pleasant conversation.

True to form, I’m averaging about a month to complete each week’s lesson in the How to Revise Your Novel course.  I started Week 3 this week, which requires me to summarize each scene in the novel in one Sentence For Revision.  This helps us see what’s missing from a scene.  I was looking forward to this lesson, but, like most of them, it’s slow starting and going for me.

We also have a reading assignment, and I got the book this week.  Reading is going fine, and I appreciate the discussion taking place on the classroom forums.  Since the purpose of the book is to demonstrate characterization (if I understand correctly), it helps me to read other people’s ideas on the subject as we read.

I just finished reading Marley and Me by John Grogan.  I may be the last person on the planet to read the book, but I’d been eyeing it since it was released a few years ago, and I finally took the plunge.

For the first half of the book or so, if you’ve never owned a large dog, you’d swear you never would.  Grogan relates horrible, horrible stories about the sheer destructiveness of Marley the Lab Puppy who never really grows up.  Actually, even if you have owned a large dog, you might swear you’d never take the chance again while reading the first half of the book.  But you’ll also be nodding along in some places, because anyone who is owned by a dog can relate SOME story of the havoc wreaked by the beast at one time or another on their lives or homes.

The Grogan’s were indeed fortunate.  Marley had a loving, loyal personality.   He never hurt a person (scaring them was another story) and was great with the kids.  No.  Marley’s destructiveness was reserved for things.  People, he loved.  In that, Marley was a good dog.

The second half of the book is the tear-jerker.  That’s where the reader learns the philosophical lessons Grogan learned from Marley and the difficult aspects of helping an elderly big dog get through life.

Our Dazzle is at least sixteen going on seventeen (maybe more), because hubby’s had her for more than a year longer than we’ve been married, and we celebrated our 15th anniversary last fall.  Like elderly Marley, Dazzle is deaf and vision-impaired.  Her hair falls out in clumps and knots up.  She’s a chow/spaniel cross, and she has the fluffy coat of a chow.  At least, in her younger years it was fluffy.  Now, it’s…not so fluffy.  She suffers from skin allergies, which contribute to it falling out.  Her hind quarters are weakening, and walking is becoming more difficult for her, made worse by frequently attempting to walk and scratch at the same time.

Despite all this, Dazzle is a happy dog, and on her good days (or moments), she can be spry and playful.  She sleeps a lot, but we sometimes catch her cavorting with Millie.  Since she doesn’t hear, I usually have to touch her to wake her.  In the morning, once I make sure she’s still alive, I usually will leave her until I finish all the other chores that go with getting the dogs outside and fed.  If she gets up on her own, that’s fine, but if not, I’ll gently wake her.  I’ve reached the point where I fully expect her to have left us, each time I go out to check on them (she’s developed a slight palsy, so I look for movement).  Her doctor did blood work on her last year to ensure we could safely give her a medication to help her skin, and she was healthy as a pup internally.  That was happy news.  Since then, we’ve been giving her the medication for her skin as well as vitamins and glucosamine.  That has helped her spryness, but it’s helping less and less.

So far, Dazzle’s walking around ok with occasional balance problems, but it won’t be long.  She’s been a good dog, and when the time comes, we’ll miss her.  For now, we try to spend some time  getting the knots out of her fur and brushing the loose fur to keep it from knotting.  She looks better, and we hope she’s more comfortable.

DISCLAIMER: The discussion after the summary of the recent investigation which is ongoing in San Antonio is merely speculation for fiction ideas.  I am in no way advocating what I contemplate for real life.

Some of you may know about the missing baby case that’s garnered a lot of news attention in San Antonio for several weeks now.  Apparently, the baby’s mother came here on a bus with the baby from Arizona shortly before Christmas.  At some point, she allegedly text messaged the father that she’d killed the baby and put him in a dumpster.  The San Antonio police have apparently been trying to determine if a private adoption was involved or if the mother’s text was credible.  For several weeks, a specific area of the local landfill has been roped off in case they determined it was a homicide instead of a missing baby.  This week, they declared the case a homicide and will begin searching the landfill for his body.

None of this is pleasant, funny, or good in any way.  However, a response to a posted news story on Facebook shifted my mind into horrible directions.  A comment in response to a comment about why authorities haven’t looked in the landfill sooner, caught my eye.  In part, it read, “Since SA is known for child killing then they should have looked sooner.”

I know the author of that comment would  never have intended the thought it prompted in me, but it got me to wondering, we have all sorts of destination locations for various activities.  People go to Las Vegas, Reno, Atlantic City, or Biloxi for gambling.  It’s a destination.  People go to Rio or Cozumel or various tropical locations for winter beaches or nightlife.  Again, a destination.  The Vegas wedding is a common destination.

Are there really destinations for child killing?  Are some environments more child killing-friendly than others?  How do you find out about them?  Probably not on the Chamber of Commerce website.  What if there were a culture out there somewhere where this behavior was acceptable, and they advertised for your business?  But more importantly, in a fictional world, if such a place existed, how would you structure the story to make it salable?

I have a few email accounts without external spam filters, so I get to filter quite a bit of email spam.  It’s pretty easy to spot.  I click on “delete from server” and “Junk” and usually don’t pay any attention to it.  But I received a new twist on the Nigerian wealth scam today.  I don’t read this, but I guess it was the “New Braunfels, Texas” in the first line or two that caught my attention.  The supposed sender gave his name and full address in New Braunfels, TX, then launches into this litany about how the Nigerians hadn’t lived up to their promises, so he took a trip to track them down.   Then he said he learned those Nigerians were fictional, and since he saw my email address on one of their lists, he wanted to let me know so I could quit sending my money to this scam.  Instead, I was supposed to contact someone else.

I shook my head, clicked “delete from server” and “Junk.”  But I thought I’d mention that these scam emails are evolving.  Either that, or our friend, Roy, has gone to great lengths to perpetrate a joke…

I’ve had XM radio since September 2005.  At that time, I bought the boom box, car kit, and home kit accessories.  I mostly listened to it when I was in the truck.  A couple years ago, my car kit died right before a long drive (the time XM satellite radio is most valuable).  That’s when I realized my tuner is out of date, but I managed to find a replacement for a very reasonable price on Amazon–after a long drive with no satellite radio.

Then I retired, and I’m in Central Texas and San Antonio most of the time.  When I’m in the truck, I listen to WOAI, 1200 AM, talk radio out of San Antonio.  It’s called The Blowtorch for a reason.  I remember receiving this station in Charles City, Iowa, at night on my radio in my room when I was a kid.  That was before I really knew or cared about San Antonio or even had it inkling it would play a role in my life.  After dark, I’ve received this station in my truck in Alabama (great when I had to go back to Alabama during the NBA finals — the game started about the time I reached Mobile, so when I hit 65N, I tuned in and as the game went on, reception got increasingly better.  I sat in the driveway for a few minutes while the game finished out, but I could receive it).  I’ve also caught the morning show while driving through Atlanta just before 8am.  This station has RANGE, and it dials up the power at night.  So, it comes in real good here in Central Texas — unless I’m in the house.  Then it’s staticky.

The XM radio hasn’t been used much over the last year and a half.  I stuck it in the console of the truck and forgot about it.  In December, I pulled it out, and it wouldn’t work.  I needed to have the XM folks send it a reactivation signal, and it jumpstarted again.  But I still wasn’t using it much in the truck.

In 2005, I bought a 5-year subscription.  It will expire in September, so I have to decide if I want to renew it or not.  If the radio is going to sit in the console of my truck, there’s certainly no need to renew.  Yesterday, I pulled the boombox down from where I stored it.  Last night, I postioned the antenna, and it works fine here in the parlor next to the Mac Mini, where I do most of my sit-down work when I’m in Central TX.

I can’t find the 5-year plan on the XM site anymore, so we’ll see what they try to bill me at when renewal time rolls around.  I expect to hear from them this summer.  At that time, I have to decide if I want to re-up, use the same receiver, or upgrade to a new receiver, or just give it up completely.  I’m still averse to paying for radio, so that’s another factor to consider.  If I only have to pay for it every five years, I can forget that I’m paying for it.  If I have to pay more often…I don’t know.

I love the clear reception.  It’s great on trips.  I hate having to scan for a channel that has something I want to listen to as I’m driving cross-country.  Of course, I’m not driving as much as I used to.  In fact, for the trip to Wisconsin for my folks 50th Anniversary celebration this summer, we’re taking Amtrak.  No virtual strip search for me, thank you.

I know 2010 just started a month ago, but here we are in February already.  Amazing, isn’t it?  I know, I know.  If you’re a high school student reading this, you’re thinking, “What do you mean?  It’s been a year already.  Why isn’t is Christmas yet?”  But if you’re older than twenty-five, you’ve noticed the theory of relativity and time is alive and well.  The older you get, the faster time flies.  Try not to get burned by the friction caused by the speed.  This is really why older people shouldn’t expose as much skin as younger people.

I’ve been engrossed in looking over Forward Motion this week and doing some long overdue clean up work.  Several of us moderators are looking at things and trying to make sure we’re helping Zette keep the site running smoothly.

Hubby went back to San Antonio this week — he has several things to do, probably one of them is to check on the status of our new Jeep/motorcycle trailer we ordered around the first of the year — a 14 ft. version of this in beige.  That was before we got the replacement roof estimate on the shop.  The new roof will cost almost as much as the building.  Gasp.  But the building is no good without a solid roof, so we bite the bullet and schedule the job.

I stayed up here in Central Texas to keep puttering away around the house.  FlyLady’s focus for February is to declutter for 15 minutes a day.  This is a habit I’d like to get into.  I’ve come around and am actively doing Shine Your Sink (in recent years, my sinks haven’t really been a problem, but I do like to keep them clean and shiny).  I’ve been making my bed as soon as I get out of it for thirty years now (Really, Mom.  One day it just hit me that it felt better at night to get into a bed that had been made in the morning, and I designed my bed to make it easy to pull the covers up and make it as soon as I got out, and I just do it.  I don’t know why it didn’t really hit me until I was 22 or so.), so that focus is no big deal for me.  And years ago the Before Bed and Morning routines became automatic.  But clutter?  I’m a packrat and don’t mind being one.  Hubby’s a packrat, and he’s worse than me about keeping things.  Together, we have a lot of stuff.  We finally have room for all of it, and now we want to know where it is and to be able to find it when we need it.  That’s what I’m working toward.  The SA house is nearly empty, so it’s getting easier to clean and declutter.  The Central Texas house is getting organized, and it’s improving.  It has plenty of wide open spaces, but has lots of room for improvement.  Fifteen minutes at a time.  I can do that.

How to Revise Your Novel?  I’m still plodding through Lesson 2.  I’m a little over a third done with it and need to devote some time to making faster progress on it this week.  Promises.  I’m trying to catch them.

Finally, the Spurs head off on their annual Rodeo Road Trip this week, and boy do they need it.  I know they start off slow and peak at about playoff time.  We go through this every year where we don’t think they’re playing championship basketball, and most years, on the Rodeo Road Trip, they come together and the synergy starts to flow.  The finish the season strong, and we fans sigh a collective sigh of relief.  The pieces of this team are beautiful.  Until they come together and become greater than the sum of their parts, they’re just another average NBA team, though.  For now, we’re waiting for the sculpture to emerge from the stone, guys.

We took a dozen bags of leaves, two buckets of rocks, and four buckets of dirt out to the ranch today to continue our road re-enforcement project.  We trimmed back some foliage.  All is well in the road department.  Our roadbed building efforts, coupled with fewer trips to the ranch in the last few years, have stabilized the roads.

We took Millie with us — she loves to run.  She also likes to play with the rat who has taken up residence in the Jeep.  Sadly, the rat has destroyed the driver seat of the Jeep to create a very cozy nest on the hood of the Jeep (we have plastic over it, so it was a very nice nest — until we swept it away.  This rat has been very destructive.  He’s destroyed the spark plug wires as well as the seat.  He’s been very fastidious and has only pooped on the floor of the passenger side of the Jeep.  And the hood has been his urinal.  We have to not only get the rat out of the Jeep but we need to winch it onto a trailer and bring it into town before he does much more damage.  That was disappointing.

Inside the motor home is a different story.  Since we seem to have gotten all the snakes out, the mice have moved in to play, and they have damaged it as well.  We will have to get the motorhome into town as well, gut it, and rebuild the interior.

My goal is to get all the equipment currently stored at the ranch hauled into town and safely stored inside at the shop.

There’s no shortage of work to be done around here.

I’ve been pulling boards out from under the house.  The previous owners stored them there, and they need to be put in a safer place — both for the boards and the house.  Our termite guy says they have to be moved, and he’s right.  We don’t have termites, and we don’t want them.

I pulled out a wide, flat board today, and a pair of toads was nestled underneath.  We like our toads, geckos, and lizards around the house.  We hope they’ll consume other bugs we’re not so fond of.

On August 28, 1963, I had been three years old for just a few weeks.  President Kennedy was still alive. And Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior, spoke at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, sharing his dream for America.

He opened the rally with this statement, “I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.” So far, no freedom event has topped this speech.  To this day, it remains the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

In an environment when many people seem to toss the words “discrimination” and “racism” at every slight.  In an environment where it is seemingly acceptable to attempt to quash any disagreement with an accusation of “racism,” I ask you to review your history.  I would agree that racism is more subtle today.  You might have to look harder to find it.  On the other hand, if you look hard enough you can twist anything to mean something.  I don’t want to trivialize this subject, but it begins to look like transference of one’s own shortcomings onto someone else.  Before you accuse someone else of racism, examine your own soul to ensure there’s no racism there.

I was fortunate enough during my times in Montgomery, AL, to be able to tour some of the Civil Rights locations.  There’s a lot of Civil Rights history in and around Montgomery, and many good things happened to bring an end to organized discrimination there.  Rosa Parks, notable for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man, sparked a 381-day bus boycott in that city.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was senior pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, now a National Historic Landmark.  The parsonage he and his family lived in is now a museum — a must not miss stop if you’re ever in Montgomery.

In 1963, one hundred years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the Negro (using Dr. King’s word, here) in America was still not free.  Forty-seven years later, we have a very different environment.

We have come further in the forty-seven years since that speech than in the previous hundred years before that.  We haven’t completely realized the dream yet — human nature, being what it is, may not let it be fully realized, but we need to take stock of where we are today in contrast to where we were then.  Acknowledge and celebrate the long, long way we’ve come along the path laid out for this journey, and look with yearning, joy, and a willingness to work to the future, because for this dream to achieve further realization, everyone must work toward the common goal laid out for us.

If you haven’t already done so, go listen to and/or read Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech.  And if you aren’t aware of our history and what black people could and could not do in this country in the early 1960s and before, please do a little studying.  You can start here at this PBS site.

*Cross-posted at Philosophical Meanderings.

I’m just getting started on this challenging lesson, but I think I’m getting the hang of it.  I’m on page 11 (of 320) and just found my first unintended promise for the book.  There may have been some earlier than this, but I don’t think so.  If anything, I’ve bludgeoned the reader with planned promises, but that would be a different problem.

In addition to tracking down the various promises I’ve made to my reader and noting them, I’m also evaluating my characters to see if they’re living up to their promise of being just the right kind of character.  Are they pulling their weight or hogging the show?  So far, I think everyone’s on target, but it’s early in the book, and I can only wonder how many more unplanned or unintended promises I’ve embedded in the book.