Coming soon...more freedom to write.

We've worked it out so that by the latter part of February, I'll be leaving Beige Cubicle Land in DC to have the time I need to focus on my writing. Up to now, it's been an hour or two stolen here and there, and year upon year upon year upon year (yeah, that would be four of 'em) of weekend hours hunkered down in a back room in the house. And that's not counting the years in school, writing, BK - before kids.

There's a picture in my head of what my finished novel should be (when it's actually finished, and by that I mean, honed all to hell's half acre) and where it is now, which is so damn close it hurts.

There's another picture of how the new novel I'm working on is coming together, and what I could do with enough time.

I have three more stories that need to get out there.

Things have gotta change, so they are.

Hope you had excellent holidays, and here's to a Happy New Year!!

Retrospective - It's 2008 again...

Paca has declared this Revisit 2008 Week and in honor of the occasion, I'm reposting my first post on this blog.

May 2008....

Hi you all,

With a lot of help, and I mean a LOT of help, from Blogless, I’ve got this blog thing going.

I swore I wouldn’t do this until I’d finished the editing of my novel. Looks like that plan worked out really well.

BT said I wouldn’t make it past mid-May until I started blogging. Maybe he hexed me with that little nugget. Maybe I just wanted to anyway, and that comment of his was my good excuse. Anyway, here we go. Hope you guys have fun with it.

Most of this sat on my blog-that-wasn’t-a-blog for a while. (I used to change my avatar almost every week and change my “About Me” as a way to sort of blog. Then, sometimes, I’d copy and paste into my quasi-blog.) I added a little at the end…

Saturday, November 24, 2007

My husband, who isn't remotely a pilgrimage kind of person, (unless there's a pub within shouting distance), opted for marital harmony and drove me on my pilgrimage to see Dylan Thomas's writing shed in Laugharne, Wales.

This was a major feat for him. He’d tried desperately the year before to rush past a little marker of a sign along a back road in England and keep me talking so I wouldn't see that the sign said "origin of the Thames”. WHAT? I'd shouted. You don't wanna see the f----in' origin of the f----in' Thames? He'd pulled the car over with a sigh, leaned against the side of the car with his nose upturned in a way I've only ever seen a British man accomplish, and said, "It's a bloody stream, Rob. A bloody stream. A trickle." Well, that was just the point, I thought - and I wanted to find the 'bubbling up from the ground point', and I could have - if only there'd been a pub close enough for my husband to hang out in while I went on my history/geography trek. But no. No pubs. And it was less than a mile away.

But there was a nice dark pub close by in Laugharne, so I was able to wander down this road and see the shed I'd come to see. I stood for a while, drinking it in. That seemed appropriate.




Then it started drizzling and I walked back up the road and into the pub and met up with my husband and a friend of ours who’d driven over to spend the day with us, a big-boned lanky redheaded guy with a long, long handlebar moustache.

The three of us sat drinking at a small round table close to the fireplace. It wasn’t the season for a fire to be burning, and that was a good thing, because a man was sleeping at the table just in front of the fireplace. And he’d either gotten very drunk or very comfortable or maybe very both, because he was lying with the back of his head on the hearth, his long black hair splayed out around him. He looked damn peaceful.

What can I say? It was a sodden day all around.

I love walking into places like this. Whether they’re seaside towns with writer’s sheds and musty, dark bars, or somewhere else, I crave places that seem, when you’re in them, as though the rest of the world is a separated place, and you’re separate too, because you’re in them.

Anybody else?

Hmmmm....

Well, hell, I can't decide what to do with this blog. For a long time, it was a closed place where I could say whatever I wanted to say, do some good venting with good friends and have some fun.

Then I decided, hmmmm, maybe I should tweak this puppy and make it my author website that isn't a website, of course, but still, it's a site. Sight. Cite. Whatever.

But now, I say, screw it. It's back to just fun for a while.

The impetus for this brain windfall? Dr. Paca, who's had the excellent idea to reconnect with our 2008 selves, back in the days when we hung out on each other's blogs, and yes, started down the voice post path, people (yeah, I've been to Southern services here and there, in my youth, Baptist and Catholic and a few in between, though I recovered, sorta...)

So get prepped, please! The week of November 14th is Paca's idea. I'm looking forward to it.

Hi you all, I'm back from vacation...

...in more ways than one.

We arrived back from Spain about a week ago. We flew United on the way over and Aer Lingus on the way home, which felt right, given that I did some editing on the flight and Irish Hill played a part in my novel, and I've found out that just about every single human being on my father's side of the family is Irish, right on down to my great-grandmother, Anna Honora Sinnott, who was born in Ireland and traveled to the States to live when she was a little girl.

We spent the first week in Britain - London for a day and a half, then the train to Bournemouth for me so I could see my daughter Allison, and a drive over to Mumbles in Wales for John. Then JB and I met up in Wales, I saw family there, and we went back to Allie's to have lunch with she and her boyfriend and his family (wonderful people!). Then up to my sister-in-law Jan's house, which is a B&B in Glastonbury called Berachah, then over to Spain to see Sylvia and her family, and the last day, we spent in Madrid.

Here's the 'slideshow' (remember back in the day when your parents invited the neighbors over to see their slides?! I still remember the sound of the click as the slides, ummmm, slid.)



View from the top, taken by John, of our London meetup with FH, Janey, Whirl and others on the Southbank in London, on (of all days) the Fourth of July. It was so wonderful, hanging out with friends!



My gorgeous and sharp-as-a-tac daughter, Allison. She's working on her BA in Illustration.



My sister-in-law Jan's conservatory and view out to her roof garden. I love being with Jan and being at her home. A slice of heaven.



View from my laptop in the George & Pilgrim in Somerset. One of my favorite places, and since it is, I decided to spend a few hours there, taking in the atmosphere, right on down to the smell of time itself, and using that to edit a couple of tough scenes. It worked.

Next: on to Spain. Jan took these next pics. John, Jan and I spent a couple of days with Sylvia and her family. We had a freaking wonderful time - wish we'd been able to stay longer! The first night we were there, Sylvia and I sat outside in a beautiful area down past their pool, and stayed up until 3:00 am, drinking and talking about writing. It was beyond good, that.



View from a restaurant veranda on the Costa del Sol.



The dead body-and-head plate you see is Jan's (ewwww). The hand you see with the mushroom (and no dead heads) pizza is mine.



Miss Sylvia's home is drop dead gorgeous. This is a picture of the lower level that opens out onto the pool area. I could've lived in a closet there and stayed really happy for a long, long time.



See that blue just under the sky in the horizon line just past the pool? Yeah. That would be the Mediterranean Sea.

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We decided to spend a day in Madrid, so we took the train up from the coast. The train was fast as a bolt from the blue. I think at one point during the trip were traveling 190 mph. Love the speed of it. Also enjoyed seeing the olive trees in grove after grove. And Madrid wasn't too bad either.

So now here we are, ensconced back in the mundane of the every day, here at home and at work. Been back for a week now. I'd rather be traveling, but there you go.

This is the last post for this blog in its present state. Soon, I'll be working on it to reconfigure it as more of an open-minded author place, where up to now it's been semi-closed and only 'us guys', which is how I've liked it. But even so, I'm looking forward to seeing what I can do with it.

Because I've finished my novel!It's going out into the world soon.

Hope you all are having a good weekend!!

Paca's Voice Thingy

This time, my kitchen is hosting the reading for me. Pull up a chair, please, and have a listen to a story about a girl's Aunt Sylvie, in one of her nicer moments.

Happy New Year

Indefinite hiatus hereby ensuing on this blog. (Heh. Sounds like a partial reading from the end of the minutes to some lawyer-y get-together.)

I'm thinking about how to use this place moving forward, because I like it here. It's comfortable. But it's also time-consumptive when I 'do right by it', and I just don't have that kind of time right now.

Happy New Year, and here's to us all getting to our goals.