A New Emphasis On Acceptence

In anticipation of my novel's publication, 26 Women, I'm trying to get more people to open and read my blog. I find a difference between people who open my email and those that click the link and go to the Blog entry. I need to increase both data points.

So with that in mind, I'll open this week with a pet photo. This not my cat, but the shot is cute, and I'm determined to widen my audience.

Instagram Photo from South Korea

This week I've had long conversations with family members. My oldest daughter and I marveled over our good fortune to have such cute littles in the clan: her grandchildren, my great-grandchildren.

Boden Hatampa

Brixton Sieve

Ledger & Jonny Sieve

Enough pandering with surefire attention-getters.

Coming soon to this space:

Shortly I will be sharing with you a project I'm working on that evolved from an observation from one person and kind of a challenge from another.

My editor, Pam Frautschi, mentioned to me as we were taking the rough edges off of my novel that I was writing like it was a stage play rather than a novel. By that, she meant I included a lot of stage directions in my story.

As an exercise, I took a piece I've been working on, copied, and pasted it into a formatting program for writing screen and stage plays. I proceeded to format the dialogue, the stage directions, and cut the rest of it. Without getting into the weeds about how much 'he said - she said' got cut, and how scene-setting absorbed a lot of the stunningly poetic language of my prose, I was amazed how little I completely cut.

Given the limits of a stage play, my script is too long by about 15-20 pages. And to be completely fair, I did revamp a couple of elements of the story to simplify the sets and costume requirements. The other revelation is, I think the story is better as a play.

Correction: In last week's blog, I misspelled the last name of Pam Frautschi. As both a friend and editor, Pam deserves better.

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Ring The Bell

It appears there is a tradition in the radiology department at Ascension Hospital that patients, upon completing their course of treatment, ring a bell. ( We know not for whom this bell tolls.) Ring the Bell with My Sweetheart Jeanne. Jeanne drove me to all but two of the appointments. Pam Frautchi took me to the other two. Today, after being zapped thirty-two times, I rang the bell. This begins a roughly one-month recovery period where the effects of the radiation abate and, I'm assured, a return to normalcy occurs. In my case, I anticipate more energy and greater awareness. Books, Books, & More Books I am simultaneously celebrating the end of the third year of volunteering for the All Saints Hunger Book Sale. Next week, we will wrap up the preparation for the sale and open our doors on August 3 for the public. I ran into this humourous but quite accurate cartoon on a T-Shirt that shows most of the volunteer's sentiments at this point. If you think the printed and bound p...

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It's time again.

It started in 2004 when we moved to our condo off Downer in Milwaukee. Then we mover to the Westside of Milwaukee when we rented from Ken Karr, the former landlord, now a current friend on Highland and 29th St. Then we moved to Mandeville Louisiana for a little less than a year. Returning to The Fox River Valley, we rented a home in Fox Crossing, formerly The Town of Menasha. When the tree fell on the roof, and the landlord felt no urgency to fix it, we moved to W. Commercial in Appleton. Here is a shocker. Are you sitting down? We are moving. No, I don't mean off the couch and out to the patio. There are too many damn mosquitoes for that to happen. No, we are packing our stuff, or at least the stuff we unpacked from the last move and moving to a home Maria purchased on Mason and Glendale in Appleton. Let me unpack that last sentence (pun planned for). We are moving at approximately the end of September to a house. The house has been in t...

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