Thursday, September 15, 2011

Must-see Donations to Scottish Poetry Library



Please believe me when I say this is not an intentional lazy post. I just could not do it justice. An author friend tweeted this link yesterday and I just had to share these extraordinary gifts to the Scottish Poetry Library. 
"One day in March, staff at the Scottish Poetry Library came across a wonderful creation, left anonymously on a table in the library. Carved from paper, mounted on a book and with a tag addressed to @byleaveswelive - the library's Twitter account - reading:
It started with your name @byleaveswelive and became a tree.… 
... We know that a library is so much more than a building full of books… a book is so much more than pages full of words.… 
This is for you in support of libraries, books, words, ideas….. a gesture (poetic maybe?)"
Jump to this page to see these marvelous sculptures. My favorite is the Gramaphone.




Please go to the site and view the other superb sculptures. 

If we all did a 1000th of what this artist is doing for our libraries, they would not be in jeopardy.

Monday, September 12, 2011

Global tributes to 911


England

France (who also built two eighty foot towers to stand beside the Eiffel Tower)

Actors in Germany at the old East West checkpoint

Grieving father at the new memorial New York

India (the man in the picture was lost that day)

Japan

Spain



May we all learn to live in peace and never forget the cost.

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Are you readddyyyyy for....

 


Gotcha! You thought I was going to say football, didn't ya? Well, okay, I am a hard core football fan and the season did start tonight with our previous SB champ Saints in Lambeau field against the defending Super Bowl champ Packers. So it was like a Super Bowl on the first night of football season. And our Saints represented themselves well - the first opener where each quarterback threw for 300 plus yards with no interceptions. A 76 point game!


But back to my opening. Are you ready for me to start blogging again? Ready or not, it's time. 

I am an optimistic person. I've actually been teased for being too perky.  I made up my mind in January that this was going to be a good year. No, a great year. I felt it. I planned on it. Everything went as planned through April when I gave my first online workshop on Scrivener to our GIAM group, then 2011 started to go south.

On April 26th we got the news that the river was expected to hit 65 ft. 
Everyone. Panicked. 
Not many people believed the levee could hold 65 feet. Now we know that if they hadn't opened the spillways it may have gone to 68. Even 65 might have topped the levee. Most people didn't believe they had any choice but to move everything to Mississippi. It's a mark of how widely this sentiment was felt that absolutely all of the storage units within a hundred miles were reserved on that day, the 26th.

So between living out of a travel trailer away from home to struggling to make ends meet due to the increase in expenses and decrease in income, my muse decided to take an Alaskan cruise. Thank God, all we experienced was a loss of income and extreme inconvenience. And finally last month, my muse returned tanned and refreshed. 

Last week I discovered she - my muse - is a water nymph. She communicates to me mostly when we are sitting by the bayou, in the shower or in the tub. And last weekend as TS Lee approached she geared up for a long session. But like me, she's not really into bad weather. When Lee came ashore and parked just southwest of us, dumping 14 inches in a little over 24 hours and causing an electrical blackout, Nymphy - she hasn't told me her name yet - took a long nap. (Do you get the feeling that she's very tempermental?)

Since the TS, the weather has gone from triple digits to low 80s. Just delightful. So tomorrow I'll spend the morning with her by the bayou letting her help me with my main characters' motivations. I'm revising my novella and a novel with the goal of publishing one of them by December. 

With the end of snow ball season closing in, Nymphy and I are working together to make the big push on Monday, my first full day off in months except for last weekend.

Where do you do your best work? Is your muse involved or is a 'muse' an ethereal non-entity for you?