Story Complete and Off to Anthology
Folks, I promised I’d come back and let you know how my plan for writing this past week worked out.
I wish you could see the broad smile on my face, because for once I was able to write a story in about ten days. I had an idea for a few weeks before that, and did write down some prose notes; however, the story only existed in my head until I wrote everything down.
The story, as it stands now, is just under 4800 words. It’s off to the anthology’s editor now, and I’ll know what she thinks within a matter of days. She told me she was looking forward to it (as I gave her updates every time I wrote another 1K words, then when I finished it up), so I hope I haven’t disappointed her.
What this proves to me is, if I have enough time and thought and health, I can still write at a decent clip. (I took two days off, but otherwise wrote 1K or wrote/revised 1K every day last week.) Five days a week at 1K is 5000 words; 5000 words times 52 weeks is 260,000 words, which is roughly two novels and/or one novel, a novella or two, a couple of novelettes, and some short stories.
Now, why haven’t I been writing as much as this up until now?
Bluntly, I have had too many demands on my time. I’ve got ill family members to keep an eye on. I’ve also built a decent career as a freelance editor.
However, I’ve been looking for a way to write more for the past year. Now, I think I’ve found it; I have to do it when I either am just getting ready for the day, or before I edit late at night. Providing I have that block of time, I can edit and do whatever else is needful without wiping out all of my energy.
Now, will this work with the upcoming concert season with the Racine Concert Band? I sincerely hope so. But as always, it’s a work in progress…
Anyway, that’s all I know. Just figured I’d give y’all an update.
What’s going on with you and your writing? Or with your other creative pursuits? Let me know in the comments!
A Sunday Roundup: Cain DFA’d, Car Oddities, and Some Writing Achieved
Folks, I thought long and hard as to whether I wanted to write one bigger blog, or three short blogs. As I’m pressed for time, I decided to go with the longer blog…so, here we go.
The Milwaukee Brewers, my favorite baseball team, designated CF Lorenzo Cain for assignment yesterday (or DFA’d for short). Cain was an outstanding offensive and defensive player before Covid-19 hit; he sat out 2020 (the truncated first Covid year), came back last year and dealt with injuries but still showed flashes of his old form, and then this year he never quite got on track.
Personally, I blame the owners’ lockout for that. Any athlete has his routine to go through, and Spring Training is as much about routine as anything. When Spring Training got disrupted by the owners’ lockout, that meant spring games were not played; at-bats were not taken; players were not able to do anywhere near what they’d usually do for several weeks until the owners and players finally came to an agreement, and the owners’ lockout ended.
Why does that matter? Well, an older athlete — and Cain is now thirty-six, ancient for a baseball player — needs more time to get in the groove. (Maybe some don’t when it comes to defensive play, but most do when it comes to hitting, pitching, and fielding.) It seemed to me that Cain was doing as well as anyone in Spring Training pre-lockout…but after, he wasn’t quite right.
Cain was hitting only .179 when the Brewers designated him for assignment. Considering his lifetime batting average is .283, that’s a significant drop-off.
Cain’s defense was still sharp, for the most part. He was still an exceptionally fast runner, as outfielders tend to be (they need to, in order to cover so much ground). He was taking extra batting practice, and doing everything he could to get his hitting in gear…but it just didn’t work.
Both Cain and the Brewers were classy about this. Cain said it was “a mutual decision” according to what I heard on TV and via radio. The Brewers waited until Cain had ten full years of major-league service time (that day being yesterday) to designate Cain for assignment, making sure that Cain was fully-vested with regards to MLB’s pensions for retired players down the line.
As WTMJ-AM announcer Brian Dee said on the “Brewers Extra Innings” program after the Brewers game yesterday, “The Brewers did Cain a solid.” I agree.
I will miss Lorenzo Cain. His energy was infectious. He had a huge smile, and obviously loved to play (even in the last few weeks, where it seemed like he couldn’t buy a hit). He was smart, savvy, and did everything right, even when he wasn’t hitting. (He said he wished things were going better, making no excuses for himself.)
I think it’s likely Cain will retire. But if he does continue to play, I hope he’ll find his hitting stroke again and enjoy baseball as much as he ever has.
Anyway, now we’re on to the “car oddities” part of the blog. And it really is an odd story…so, here I go with that.
I was parked in one of the lots at the apartment complex where my Mom lives. That lot is dark after 8:30 p.m. in the summer (and no better in the winter, either; in fact, in the winter it is hard to see probably after 4:30 or 5:00 p.m.), which matters. And when I parked, I was the only person in the lot with a 2010 Hyundai Accent Blue. (Yes, this matters, too.)
When I walked out to leave, there was an identical car parked next to me. I only realized it once I got in the wrong car, realizing that I didn’t have an air freshener (this car did), that the car was far too neat to be mine, and the seat was also in the wrong position.
So, I got out of the car, and automatically locked the driver’s door and the passenger side door behind me (as I always do), after I got my hand-cart out of the back seat.
Anyway, I then realized I did not have my purse. I had left it in the wrong car!
Fortunately, the passenger side doors were open (as the driver’s side ones had been, too). I reached in, got my purse, and got the Hell out of there.
However…I left my cane in that car, and I didn’t realize it until I was all the way home.
My brother is visiting right now and saw my agitation over it all. (I hate being stupid, and I really felt stupid with this.) He drove me back to the lot, exclaimed about how dark that lot is, and said anyone could’ve made that mistake with two cars, identical makes and models, in almost no lighting. And yes, he opened up the passenger side door (which fortunately I hadn’t locked), and indeed, my cane was in that wrong car.
I don’t know what the owner of that car is going to think when they go back out to their car, mind you. (I have no idea who this is. Until now, I had no idea that anyone in the complex or among the people who regularly visit had a car identical to mine.) The seat is in the wrong position for them, as I pushed it all the way back. The driver’s side doors are locked, while the other two are not, and they’d left them all unlocked.
I considered leaving a note, but I had no idea what to say.
My brother said that I should leave well enough alone. If I figure out who that person is, I’ll apologize; otherwise, he said I should leave it be as it was an honest mistake.
He drove me back home, where my father wasn’t too happy over the whole affair. (Dad has never seen that lot at night. Jim tried to tell him, but Dad still didn’t understand how this could happen. At all.)
Now that I know there is another car with the same paint job (light blue), the same make and model, the same wheels, all that, I will look at the license plate before I get into the car. (Other distinguishing features of my car were unable to be seen in that light.)
As it was, my brother had to park the car in such a way — half in and half out of the spot — and shine his headlights on the wrong car (as I had driven my own car back and left it at home) before he could see well enough to figure out if the cane was in the car. (His phone has a flashlight. My phone with a flashlight was back at home, of course. But even his flashlight app couldn’t tell him whether the cane was in there or out, and he didn’t want to open the car door unless he was sure the cane was in there.)
I don’t know if anyone else has ever had this happen before — two cars, both identical in dim light, same make, same model, same paint job, and all — but it is truly strange. (Thus, “car oddities.”)
Finally, after I’d gotten back home again, and talked this out with a few friends who live overseas in different time zones (as my good friends who live here were all asleep, as they should’ve been), I managed to write one thousand words into a new Elfyverse short story. I’d wanted to write all week long, and the time got away from me…but I figured that as I was back, and was too scattered to edit, I should do something creative in the hopes that it would help me calm myself a little.
It worked.
At any rate, I will try to schedule time to write over the next few days and see how it goes.
What’s going on with you? Anything new this Sunday? How is your writing going, for the writers out there? Let me know in the comments…especially about the car oddity.
Thinking Hard, Still…an Update
Folks, I am still pondering, processing, or otherwise have much of my thinking ability engaged elsewhere. I think it still is because of the dual tragedies of the shooting in Buffalo at the supermarket by a white supremacist, and the bizarre awfulness that went into the Uvalde, TX, school shooting and its aftermath. (I will never understand what the Uvalde police thought they were doing there. Never.)
That said, I have a bit of an update.
I have written twenty-three bars of music, and I added 800 words to “Keisha’s Vow.” (I am now up to approximately 50K words, which is half of a standard novel for me, or maybe 2/3 of a short novel.) So I am being at least slightly creative, which makes me feel a bit better.
The other thought I had this week was this: We can’t live in fear all our lives. (Hey, I didn’t say it was an original thought, as many have had this thought before.)
None of us know the future.
This is perhaps our saving grace, as well as a source of immense frustration. We don’t know how our actions will change the future; we don’t know if they’ll change anything at all. (Who said “most lives are full of quiet desperation?” Henry David Thoreau, though I’m paraphrasing it.)
Still, we live. We all have to find our own purpose or reason for living. (As Lois McMaster Bujold’s character Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan says, “Find your own meaning, because the universe surely isn’t going to supply it.” Best paraphrase from LMB’s book BARRAYAR.)
I also know that nearly everyone at any time has thought their time was the worst era to live in. The Regency Era had the French Revolution. The dawn of the USA had the US Revolution (needed and necessary to become independent). Then in the 1860s we had the Civil War (or the unCivil War, if you’d rather). In all cases, young men were dying (and a few young women, as there have always been some women fighters and nurses). In all cases, families were forever transformed.
So, this time to live — where we’ve seen wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Ukraine, where the 1970s had “stagflation” and drivers who could only fill up on alternate days depending on the last digit of their car’s license plate, and the 1980s had “greed is good,” and the 1990s had rampant unemployment, and the 2000s had the Great Recession and even more unemployment — maybe is nothing new, compared to previous eras.
Maybe every time to live is equally dangerous.
What I do know is, we have more education now than the Regency Era had. We have more information available now to the vast majority of people than at any time prior to the advent of the personal computer. We have instantaneous communication, which is good; we have lots and lots of folks who seem to enjoy being rude and obnoxious on the internet, which isn’t.
So, there’s no excuse for ignorance anymore. Maybe there never was.
Still. There’s a type of person who’d rather remain ignorant, who’d rather believe that his garbage doesn’t stink, who’d rather believe he (or she) is unique, precious, and everyone else is lower than dirt and deserves nothing at all.
I work against that type of person. And I hope you do, too.
Anyway, I’ll keep doing what I can to create. (You do the same, eh?)
Thinking Hard…
Folks, the events of recent days — especially all of the various awful things such as the two people wounded while attending a funeral in Racine, WI, last week, and of course the distressing events of Uvalde, TX — have brought my creativity to a screeching halt.
I am thinking very hard right now, but unfortunately it doesn’t translate into creativity.
There are so many difficulties in this world right now, with the never-ending pandemic, the seemingly everyday violence of mass shootings, the war in Ukraine, the fact that we Americans can’t seem to talk to one another anymore, and that it seems impossible to build a life that’s better than our parents’ lives before ours.
As I’ve said before, I don’t have the answers. I just have questions.
My best guess as to when I’ll be able to write, or compose music, or do much creative work besides editing, is that it’ll probably still be a few more days to a few more weeks.
The last time I felt this stupid-stunned over everything was after the storming by the FBI of the Branch Davidian compound just outside of Waco, TX, back in 1993. 75 people died, including little kids. The FBI wanted to arrest the leader of the compound, David Koresh, but were unable to get to him. After 51 days, the FBI threw tear gas into the compound, which somehow started several fires.
Only nine people — nine — lived through that.
Once I got my creativity back, I wrote a piece I called “Lament.” To date, it’s the only one of my compositions that has been performed, albeit in practice, by anyone except for myself. (I write many things as solos for the clarinet or saxophone, so I can at least hear my own compositions played. I have written other larger-scale works, but not many.) It echoed exactly how I felt at the time, and it had a spooky eeriness I liked.
I don’t know what’ll emerge from me and my well of creativity once I finish thinking so hard. But I do know that eventually I will again create, and I hope on that day that someone, somewhere, will hear my music and think to themselves, “Wow. How did she sum up what I was feeling in music rather than words?”
(Maybe that’s too hubristic. If so, I’m sorry.)
My late husband Michael once said that it didn’t surprise him that when I was very, very upset, I composed music first, and only after that could I write in words. His view was that music was my first, best language, and that everything I wrote in words was translated from the music I heard first.
As I felt that rather poetic, even though he denied it and said it was just common sense, I never forgot it.
I do hope he was right.
Read SF Giants Manager’s Important Words — Do It Today #MustRead
Tonight, I read an exceptionally well-written article about gun violence from former Milwaukee Brewers player and current San Francisco Giants manager Gabe Kapler. He explored this topic through the issue of a moment of silence on the field before every major league baseball game, and points out that’s not enough.
Here is the article: https://kaplifestyle.com/2022/05/27/home-of-the-brave
And a relevant quote:
When I was the same age as the children in Uvalde, my father taught me to stand for the pledge of allegiance when I believed my country was representing its people well or to protest and stay seated when it wasn’t. I don’t believe it is representing us well right now.
This particular time, an 18 year old walked into a store, bought multiple assault rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, walked into a school with an armed resource officer and its own police district and was able to murder children for nearly an hour. Parents begged and pleaded with police officers to do something, police officers who had weapons and who receive nearly 40% of the city’s funding, as their children were being murdered.
We elect our politicians to represent our interests. Immediately following this shooting, we were told we needed locked doors and armed teachers. We were given thoughts and prayers. We were told it could have been worse, and we just need love.
But we weren’t given bravery, and we aren’t free. The police on the scene put a mother in handcuffs as she begged them to go in and save her children. They blocked parents trying to organize to charge in to stop the shooter, including a father who learned his daughter was murdered while he argued with the cops. We aren’t free when politicians decide that the lobbyist and gun industries are more important than our children’s freedom to go to school without needing bulletproof backpacks and active shooter drills.
GABE KAPLER, “HOME OF THE BRAVE?” ESSAY
https://kaplifestyle.com/2022/05/27/home-of-the-brave
When I see something as well-written as this, whether I agree with it or not — and here, I obviously do agree with it! — I try to pass the words along.
I realize there are people who regularly read my blog who will not appreciate this post. But I urge you to read Gabe Kapler’s words anyway, in the same way I read George Will’s writing or Max Boot’s, because while I don’t often agree with either Will or Boot, I appreciate how they use language to make their points.
One, final word: Gabe Kapler articulated all of this better than anyone I’ve yet seen. Read his important words.
Read them NOW.
Very Quick Monday Update
Folks, the last week or so, I’ve been running on empty.
Why? Well, as I said, I had priority edits to work on. One has been completed, and I plan to discuss it as soon as the book comes out. Four more are in process with various authors, and one of those nears completion also.
But of course that’s not the only reason.
Last week, Friday, I walked into the urgent care clinic. I knew I felt lousy. My throat hurt so much, I couldn’t sip water without pain. I was using either Chloraseptic or Sucrets (both of which have mouth-numbing properties) to be able to swallow, and most of the food I’d eaten in the previous week consisted of soup, oatmeal, and rice.
Anyway, the rapid strep test came back negative. But as I had red spots at the back of my throat that were not consistent with a sinus infection (these people have seen me many times, possibly as much or more than my regular physician), and as I wasn’t feeling well whatsoever, I was prescribed antibiotics.
The antibiotics, in short, have kicked me in the teeth.
Perhaps that’s what I need, in order to get better. I know the next few weeks will be hectic, as the Racine Concert Band will have rehearsals before our May concert, and I know it’s very difficult for me to allow myself to rest when I have so much work left to do. (And that’s not even talking about the writing I need to do for my own purposes, much less the music composition. I was in the middle of writing a march for a good friend of mine, and that has to stay on hold, too.)
But that does not mean I enjoy feeling like I’ve been run over by a bus. (Then again, if I did, wouldn’t you have to wonder about me?)
I’ve done everything I can toward helping my family as I was able during the past week. I think things are set up well enough that I can rest and hopefully heal without having to expend too much energy. I also think it’s possible that if I do this, I can go to the rehearsal on Thursday for the RCB and enjoy playing music with them.
That said, I’m trying to rest, heal, edit when my body lets me (may it please let me today, later, as I do have that priority project waiting for a few good hours of my time and concentration), and think good thoughts.
One final thought: There is a lot of outright despair at the moment. Folks are very angry, and it isn’t getting better (the divisive issue of abortion isn’t helping in the US; for the record, I believe in “safe, legal, and rare” as desperate women used to use Lysol as an abortifacient and that was extremely hazardous). We seem to have forgotten that we’re all human, and we have more in common than not.
I urge people to find their empathy, fast.
In the case of abortion, I’ve known some very good pro-life folks who worked hard for women’s rights. One, a clarinetist I knew in Nebraska, would drop everything and go at a moment’s notice to bring one of her pregnant friends food, take her to the doctor, and helped her through her grief (giving birth when you don’t want to is not only physically difficult and frustrating, but has all sorts of other things come into play). She did this because she and her friends believed abortion was murder.
I also note, for the record, that she did not shun people who were pro-choice. She knew I was. She had no problems with me, because we both wanted what was best for the women. And we absolutely, positively agreed that women who were poor but wanted to raise their kids should get all the help they needed to find good jobs, get excellent child care, and have the nutrition they needed to help raise their families.
If we could agree, back in the mid-1990s, that these things are important, why can’t people do so now?
Life is too short for division and strife.
A Sunday Update
Folks, I’ve been doing one of three things the past few weeks. These are, in no particular order, helping family, editing, and resting. (Yes, I include fighting migraines and other health problems as “resting.” I don’t think that’s how most people would see it, but if I’m not up and doing, I’m resting.)
I’ve also been concerned about a number of things in the news, as per usual.
The War in Ukraine continues, though the focus on it in the American media is less. It seems to have become a proxy war between Vladimir Putin and everyone else. I admire Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky, and believe he’s done as much as he can to save his country from annihilation. But if we take our eyes off that war, we run the risk of making things worse for ourselves.
In other words, reality must be faced. Even if we don’t like it. Maybe especially when we don’t like it…but reality must be faced.
That’s the only way to do anything about it.
Anyway, on to other things.
One clickbait video I saw a few minutes ago is about Amber Heard and a disgusting, disturbing “prank” she played on her then-husband, Johnny Depp. She put “poo” (feces/poop) in his bed, and called it “a prank gone horribly wrong.”
What kind of woman does this?
(No, I didn’t click on the video. No point.)
For those of you who have had weird things happen during the course of your relationships, or worse, your marriages, I want to urge you to think of this: Not everyone behaves this way. Not everyone is as disturbed as Amber Heard seems to be (and/or anyone else who thinks this is a good idea). Most people do not and will not ever behave this way.
As I’ve said before, my two marriages before I met and married Michael were awful. I dealt with a lot of stupid, petty crap, and my second marriage in particular could’ve easily been annulled. (Michael was the only keeper, and he always said that as far as he was concerned, he was my only husband. I tend to agree.)
But even my ex-husbands did not behave like Amber Heard did in this instance.
There are some lines, folks, that you should not cross. What Amber Heard did is one of them.
Anyway, I must return to my editing. Do take care and have a great week ahead. (I’ll check in at some point, with whatever is on my mind most at the time, as per usual.)
Barb Caffrey's Blog 