On Walking and Artist Dates - IWSG November 2024

 

Welcome to IWSG Day. The goal of this blog hop is to share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a haven for insecure writers of all kinds. IWSG is the brainchild of Alex Cavanaugh. Thank you to November co-hosts: Diedre Knight, Lisa Buie Collard , Kim Lajevardi, and JQ Rose. To find links to all contributors, click here.

November optional question: What creative activity do you engage in when you're not writing?

Years ago I worked through the twelve-week lessons from The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron. One of the requirements was to take a weekly “artist date,” which could be any activity designed to inspire creativity. Unemployed at the time and not keen on spending money, an artist date for me meant a walk with my camera.

Having worked indoors for more than half of my life by then, walking outside any time I wanted introduced me to a world I'd missed. Everything I encountered felt nuanced and layered. Two dories reflecting on still water at dawn. A paint-peeling house emerging from a thick fog at the edge of a salt marsh. Egrets stick-legging through the eelgrass. A golden retriever balancing on the gunnel of a lobster boat as it trundled into the harbor. Each time I took a walk, I found myself savoring these vignettes, taking them into my heart, if you will. It was during this time I learned to look east during sunset to find a more subtle beauty, and that winter light offers something ethereal so it's worth bundling up to catch it. Even now I think that spell of unemployment was one of the best things that's ever happened to me. After each outing I downloaded my photos and more often than not, wrote a blog post about something I’d witnessed.

These days, my writing is pretty much at a standstill. A reader/proofreader I trust is going through my last project, so I can’t fuss with that right now. I have no will or desire to start anything new but I don’t want to stop the practice of writing. For the past month I’ve been forcing myself to journal during my early morning writing hour. Truth be told, it feels like homework and I give myself weekends off for good behavior. Thankfully, I woke up last Saturday with an artist date in mind. Before I could talk myself into chores, I hopped into the car.

It helps when things seem fresh and new, so I took myself to a park one town over that I've rarely been to and not for a very long time. The land was purchased by the navy in 1906 and served as an ammunition depot until the early '70's when the government declared it surplus. Paved roads remain from its former incarnation. Rambling dirt paths skirt the river. The location is popular with dog walkers and joggers and it was busy enough that I felt the company, but peaceful enough for me to reflect on my own thoughts. I have a new phone and since the upgrade from an iPhone 8 to a 16, improvements to the camera are notable.

So there I was, walking amid the skitter of falling leaves, watching kids trying to skim rocks on the river while imagining gunmetal ships docked at old wharfs. The sun is low in the sky these days and my phone could actually capture the sparkles on the water. A cormorant circled and I waited, hoping it would land on an old piling and lift its wings to dry them. When it did, relief floated through me. 

I may not have a writing project to work on, but at least I came up with an IWSG post.

What creative activity inspires you?

Past, Present, Future - IWSG October 2024

 

Welcome to IWSG Day. The goal of this blog hop is to share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a haven for insecure writers of all kinds. IWSG is the brainchild of Alex Cavanaugh. Thank you to October co-hosts, Nancy Gideon, Jennifer Lane, Jacqui Murray, and Natalie Aguirre. To read posts from other contributors, click here.

October optional question: Ghost stories fit right in during this month. What's your favorite classic ghostly tale? Tell us about it and why it sends chills up your spine.

My favorite ghost story isn’t a Halloween story, but it’s a classic. I’m not much of a scary story kind of girl, so it’s probably good that my first experience with A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens was a version featuring Mr. Magoo, the bumbling, vision impaired cartoon character from the 1960’s. How frightening could a story be with him as the star? By the time I was assigned to read the actual tale for high school English it was like returning to an old friend.

But it was the 1984 movie starring George C. Scott that put A Christmas Carol at the top of my favorite scale. We first watched it back in the VCR days, and my husband and I liked that adaptation so much we taped it, rewinding and playing it again every Christmas. There is still a DVD of it stored in a box labeled “Christmas Movies” at the top of my family room closet.

Scott is chillingly believable as the miserly Scrooge denying Bob Cratchit his piece of coal and returning to his own frigid house for a bowl of broth on Christmas Eve. He assumes it's his imagination when he hears the rattling of chains from the ghost of his late partner, some kind of dream triggered by a digestive complaint. Once he accepts the visitations are real however, he becomes incrementally more sympathetic as the ghosts of past, present and future show him what his worship of money has cost him and what more he stands to lose. Scott is marvelous as a newly reformed Scrooge, jumping up and down on his bed the next morning as he realizes all the good he can do.

So, yes, it’s my favorite take on my favorite ghost story because the acting is so superb it feels real. Even now, the sound of the screeching whine that accompanies the beckoning finger of the Ghost of Christmas Past gives me the willies. For those of you not of a certain age, picture a dementor from the Harry Potter movies. When the apparition first arrives, it scares the Dickens out of Scrooge (lol), and no matter how many times I watch it, it does the same to me.

What is your favorite ghost story? Is there a particular scene that sticks with you?

Punctuation, Commas [,] and Getting it Right

 

Welcome to IWSG Day. The goal of this blog hop is to share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a haven for insecure writers of all kinds. IWSG is the brainchild of Alex Cavanaugh. Thank you to the co-hosts for September: Beth Camp, Jean Davis, Yvonne Ventresca, and PJ Colando. To read posts from other contributors, click here.

This month’s optional question: Since it's back to school time, let's talk English class. What's a writing rule you learned in school that messed you up as a writer?

English. Oy. So many rules and I’m supposed to choose only one? 

This question brought me back to seventh grade. Our English teacher Miss Newman was lovely, but I had a lot going on that year and spent a good deal of class distracted, which is to say I failed to learn how to diagram a sentence. Enough rubbed off that I know my parts of speech, but how to punctuate them is a definite weakness. 

In a display of I’m never too old to learn-itis, before receiving this month’s optional question, it happens I did a little research on the Oxford comma. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I knew the definition of an OC but I’ve encountered enough controversy about it online that I decided it was time to educate myself. Back in the day, I was taught that a comma before the conjunction preceding the last item in a list was optional, depending on what it did for clarity. My research revealed my “optional” comma is the Oxford comma, also known as the serial comma. Much ado about not very much I suppose (except for a 2014 lawsuit in Maine you can read about here), but the general idea is to be consistent with usage and always make sure you are being clear.

Oxford comma: I live with my brothers, monkey, and snake.

No Oxford comma: I live with my brothers, monkey and snake.

Without the OC, it reads that the brothers are the monkey and snake. With it, you can tell the brothers, monkey, and snake are separate parts of the list.

But when all is said and done, perhaps the best idea is to re-write the sentence.

I live with my brothers. I also have a monkey and a snake.

Anyway, there is more debate than I even knew with regard to my “optional comma,” because my research revealed that the AP Stylebook (Hello journalists!) does not use the OC, but the Chicago Manual of Style, used by book publishers, does.

Aha. This explains a lot. I started my secondary education as a journalism major before morphing to English Literature. Go figure. I guess it’s easier to blame my OC lack of clarity on competing writing styles rather than a failure to pay attention during ancient history.

Oops, sorry. I mean seventh grade English.

Where do you land on the Oxford Comma issue? What other writing rules confound you?

A Real Download - IWSG August 2024

 

Welcome to IWSG Day. The goal of this blog hop is to share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a haven for insecure writers of all kinds. IWSG is the brainchild of Alex Cavanaugh.  Thank you to August co-hosts Feather Stone, Kim Lajevardi, Diedre Knight, C. Lee  McKenzie, and Sarah - The Faux Fountain Pen! To read posts from other contributors,  click here.

August optional question: Do you use AI in your writing and if so how? Do you use it for your posts? Incorporate it into your stories? Use it for research? Audio?

Typically when I write an IWSG post, I start it a week ahead, pretty much as soon as we get the email reminder with the month’s optional topic. But last week I received the email in the middle of my second week of a “staycation,” and could think of nothing relevant to the topic to write. In fact, I couldn't think of anything to write at all. So I tabled it. When Sunday arrived, my last day before going back to work, I spent it grocery shopping, reading at the beach, and then getting myself organized to get back into the work routine. I woke after midnight feeling normal work anxiety along with a sudden shock that I'd forgotten to get back to my IWSG post. Even then, I had no idea what I would write. I’m woefully undereducated as it pertains to AI and had no other topic. I tossed and turned, wondering if I could bail out with pictures of my hydrangeas, but oops, I did that last month.

As a result, here I sit, 6:37 am on Monday in front of the computer and this is what you get. A brain dump. Not an artificially crafted piece, but one generated as a result of my conviction that even when I have no idea for a post, if I sit down to write, something will come. So, back to the topic at hand. Writing using AI? Nope. While I suppose there are places where it can be utilized effectively (Legal briefs? Insurance documentation? Real estate closings?) my guess is, I won’t be using it for my creative writing anytime soon.

Like everyone else, of course I USE AI. How can we not? Search engines, navigation systems, online credit cards and banking, Venmo, the computer in my car, even my new oven is Wi-Fi enabled. It sends a message to my phone when it has preheated and another when the timer goes off. I could go on and on--to the point I worry about the world of hurt we’ll all be in when the internet crashes sometime. Hints of that are already happening (Hello, last week's airline outage). What's our back up plan? I know I’m an antique when I pull out my paper checks, and the yellowing Rand McNally road atlas in my car may be severely outdated, but in a pinch it could still get me from point A to point B (although the odds of getting stuck in traffic will be greater). I hang on to these vintage tools because I’m pretty sure we're so reliant on technology that we've lost ability to function without it. They're MY back up plan. And then there’s this. I picture the old Terminator movies and wonder if that’s our future? Will artificial intelligence turn on us?

And that sums up the difference between AI and me. I have the capacity for worry.

But—I also have the ability to think positively. So, as I “create” this post, I remind myself that artificial intelligence wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for human intelligence in the first place. This essay is my little demonstration of the real deal. Using my own brain, in less than twenty minutes, I created the barebones of this post that I’ll tweak to turn into my August IWSG obligation.

There you have it. It’s now 6:56 am.

Full disclosure: I’ll use the AI from Microsoft Word’s “Read Aloud” function as I revise this piece, before scheduling it to publish on Wednesday.  

6:58 am.

First draft done.

What's your writing world experience with AI?

"Groups" and Therapy? IWSG June 2024

 

Welcome to IWSG Day. The goal of this blog hop is to share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a haven for insecure writers of all kinds. IWSG is the brainchild of our fearless ninja leader Alex Cavanaugh. Co-hosts for the June posting of the IWSG are  Shannon Lawrence, Melissa Maygrove, Olga Godim and ME! To read other contributors, click here.

This month’s optional question: In this constantly evolving industry, what kind of offering/service do you think the IWSG should consider offering to members?

I’m being a smart-aleck here, but personally, I’d go for a rejection therapy group! While I’m pretty good at taking no for an answer, it’s ugly when you finally talk yourself into querying again, send out four queries, get one immediate "no," wait for a while, and then receive two rejections on the same day. Yes, I can do the math. When I sent the fourth one, the instructions said there would be an automatic confirmation receipt, but one never appeared in my inbox (or my "trash," and yes I looked), so who knows if it ever made it? How about a power of positive thinking group, too, in which we repeat  mantra’s like, at least three out of four responded, and aren’t I glad those queries were for an older project (as I gear up to start querying my newest one)?

I know the drill. Two rejections means it’s time to send out two more. Ugh.

All kidding aside, I peruse the IWSG site to find information on agents, publishing, and querying. I’ve taken part in IWSG Twitter pitches, and weekly posts by various members often provide helpful tidbits.

I do wonder if IWSG might offer a means through which like-writers can identify each other in order to develop small, interactive groups for reading and critiquing ongoing work. Back in the dark ages, I became a member of an online writing group that I think was formed through IWSG, but it faded into oblivion. Of course, anyone seeking to create or join a group could always shout out in a monthly post “Hey, I’m looking for X number of writers for regular reading and critiquing of XYZ genre,” but perhaps there’s a way to come up with something more curated?

In a similar vein, writers are often looking for beta readers. I’ve found some of mine through IWSG in the past, but they've been people with whom I’ve already developed “blogging” relationships. Again, individual posts by IWSG members expressing the need for beta readers would probably work, but perhaps a list of members willing to read, their qualifications and genre would be helpful?

Regardless, I want to call out Alex and all the administrators to express my thanks for continuing to pursue ways through which IWSG may help writers grow.

Off the Rails - IWSG May 2024

 

Welcome to IWSG Day. The goal of this blog hop is to share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a haven for insecure writers of all kinds. IWSG is the brainchild of our fearless ninja leader Alex Cavanaugh.  Thank you to co-hosts for May:  Victoria Marie Lees, Kim Lajevardi, Nancy Gideon, and Cathrina Constantine.

This month’s optional question: How do you deal with distractions when you are writing? Do they derail you?

I started writing a response to this month’s question last week, but then, well, I got derailed.

I am not an effective multi-tasker. When I'm writing, I’m all in, to the detriment of anything else on my to-do list. Currently though, there’s a construction project going on at my house which has provided enormous distraction. No matter what I think I’ll be doing after work each afternoon, very little of it has been getting done.

The early mornings are quiet, so I can still write then, and during the first two weeks of demolition, I wrote after work, sitting down at the computer wearing headphones. Now though, it’s the decision-making stage and every answer requires research. Rather than doing the late afternoon writing that has been powering me along, I’m Googling. The building inspector has required me to replace a door to the garage. Research doors. Do I want overhead pendant lights? Research, research, research and…no. The bricks I chose to match existing brick for a part of the project are unavailable, which meant visiting brickyards. During one such adventure, Google Maps played games, sending my daughter and me onto the highway then off and over it, only to put us back on the highway where we started. Ultimately, it directed us to a subway parking garage and announced we were at our destination. When we finally found the brickyard, half a mile from that garage, it was in the process of being demolished. Thanks AI. I swear I heard the phone chuckle.

So, back to this month’s question. How do I deal with distractions? With headphones until that doesn’t work anymore. Then I hop off the tracks. It’s all good. I still have my morning writing time. Eventually the project will get done and besides, the trip to the brick yard provided fodder for future writing.

In the meantime, they're about to start hanging cabinets. There are drawer pulls to choose. Who knew you could have handles or knobs, or handles and knobs? (Insert eye roll here.) Time for more research.

The Long Haul - IWSG April 2024

Welcome to IWSG Day. The goal of this blog hop is to share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a haven for insecure writers of all kinds. IWSG is the brainchild of our fearless ninja leader Alex Cavanaugh. Thank you to the April co-hosts:  Janet Alcorn, T. Powell Coltrin, Natalie Aguirre, and Pat Garcia! To read other contributors, click here.

April question - How long have you been blogging? (Or on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram?) What do you like about it and how has it changed?

Fifteen years ago, the day after a surprise layoff, I sat at the computer fashioning an essay about how it felt to be suddenly unemployed. I had no plan to create Middle Passages but on a whim, I looked up how to start a blog. Google made it so easy, before the day was over that essay became my first live post. Publishing it was life-changing because in it I revealed my closeted writing passion and announced my intention to make sure no matter what I did next, writing would be a part of it. Talk about making myself accountable.

For the first several months I published in a vacuum, unaware I needed to follow and earn followers, otherwise my words disappeared into a vast black hole. My first (non-family) comment appeared the same day I joined a LinkedIn writing group. After that we were off to the races. I joined a world in which bloggers hosted writing contests and blog hops and bestowed blog awards. I wrote five days a week and the whole process was so encouraging that quite frankly, I loved it. This blog eased me through much soul searching and self-discovery. It gave me purpose. It made me dare to try new things.

That said, even early in my blogging “career,” writers I admired stopped posting and/or moved on to other communication vehicles. Many had blogged to enhance their author brands and found quicker/different ways to market themselves. My life morphed too. I worked part-time and freelanced for a period before accepting full-time employment again, and yes, I write as a part of my job. I also write my own fiction and with less time to myself, eventually something had to give. I’m still here, but now I blog once a month for IWSG. 

So many bloggers from those beginning days have moved on. There are many I still miss. Sadly, a few  have passed away. Some have stopped writing. Others write but don’t blog. Who's to say how life will morph for any of us? But for me, regardless of all that has changed, there's one thing that never will. I'll remain ever grateful that on my first unexpected, unemployed day, I wrote a heartfelt essay and dared myself to press "publish."

What do you like best about blogging?