Flat Kira checks out Tiffany's

Dear Kira Rose,

Sorry I missed writing to you yesterday.  Grandmommy and I have been working hard getting her house ready for your visit.

Yesterday, after shopping again--this time at a real mall--we wrapped even more presents (Kelsey's going to love the one that showed up in the mailbox yesterday!) and then reorganized the closet where all the giftwrap goes.  With all the presents coming in, we had a bunch of big boxes to take apart too.  Grandmommy says we'll be going to the dump before you get here so you won't think her back porch is a dump!

We've vacuumed the downstairs twice today: this morning to get rid of the gift-wrapping leftovers and this afternoon to

 get rid of the styrofoam bits from yet more boxes that we opened!  Aunt Michelle and Uncle Rick stopped by to install some new ceiling lights for Grandmommy.  She says they are Tiffany (-style) lights.  I thought Tiffany's was just the name of a fancy store but I guess not!  Anyway, Grandmommy says she loves her new lights so much that she may never, ever turn them off!

After church tomorrow, we're going to Uncle Jamie's for Christmas breakfast (he's invited everyone in your South Carolina family, but Mason and Campbell are at their dad's until dinnertime so they can't come).  I heard him say something about pancakes and bacon and grits (what's grits???) . . .  Tomorrow afternoon we're going to Aunt Michelle's for Christmas dinner.  Mason and Campbell

picked out the menu: barbecued chicken and mashed potatoes and corn.  Yummy!!!!!!

The yards and driveway are still drifted with leaves (Grandmommy says that I'm learning to be a writer!!!) but we don't care.  It"s Christmas Eve and all is well with the world!

Can't wait to see you guys!!!!

Love you bunches!

Flat Kira

P. S.  Be sure to tell Grandma that those pears she sent us are heavenly!!!!!!  Aunt Michelle took four of them home with her this afternoon for her family :-)

Simple Pleasures: a story

Every blog has a story. This is the story of how Simple Pleasures came to be and still is . . .

Three years ago, I might not have been able to tell you what a blog is. I’d heard of them, I know, because, when Jamie suggested I create a blog, I had some idea of what he meant.

Christie was on call that Saturday morning in June 2006, Cassie arrival was several weeks in our future, and I was spending quality time with Jamie, who was probably in the middle of one of his forever home improvement projects, and with Michael, who was two. Whatever the catalyst, our talk drifted from how to keep our out-of-state relatives current with photos of children who seem to grow up overnight to why didn’t I create a blog and post pictures there. Jamie helped me set up a blog on what was then blogger.com.

The first two photos—Michael on the slide (his not-yet-arrived sister was to master the “big” slide first, before she was two) and Michael in the box (they were both “box children” two Fridays ago)—were Jamie’s, not mine. The first photo of Michael with Cassie—their first meeting a month late—wasn’t mine either. I’m the hand keeping him from tumbling off the hospital bed :-) But I’ve taken and posted and sometimes blogged about more than my share of family photos since.

The blog’s name came with its repurposing the next February. I was enrolled in a writing class—required training for my work—where the assignment was to create a multigenre memoir. At the time, I also took several days’ leave to stay with my mother who was recovering from back surgery. On daffodil-cheered and contrail-inspired neighborhood walks in the small southern town where I grew up, I tugged on memories and, one day, remembered my dormant blog. And decided I would write my memories of simple pleasures there . . .

Simple Pleasures soon assumed a life all its own. I've used the blog, when teaching graduate courses in writing and in technology, as an example of how we may meld both in order to capture, to pass on to others what matters most in our lives. I've used it to process, as writers do, my innermost self. I've used it to hold time fast, to make sense of the world around me. I've used it to play with language, to prove to myself that others’ faith in my writing gift has some merit. And always, because I know that to be a writer I must be able to face and to tell the truth, I write who and where I am at each published moment in time.

The blog came full circle last week when I/we used it to craft the stories that would be compiled into Kimberly’s First 20 Years scrapbook. At some point a couple of years ago, we decided to make Simple Pleasures a family venture. Somehow Jamie, whose brainchild this blog was in its beginning, has yet to find, and accept, his emailed invitations to join us on the contributors’ list. But the door is forever open.

Simple Pleasures has spin-offs—one a spoof of sorts on my ongoing love affair with technology and the other (only one entry anyone but me is allowed to read . . . yet) is my thinking about why I am not a writer.

Many read but few comment, at least not here. I’ve been told that some of you don’t know what to say in response to my entries. Oooooh, does that mean I may be a writer after all?

Come back often. Read. Enjoy. And, if so moved, let me know your thinking about my thinking . . .

always a writer . . .

Did Kimberly ever tell you about winning the Lieutenant Governor's Essay Contest--not just for her school but for her entire school district--in eighth grade? And that she had to read her essay to the school board and its audience? Bet she hasn't, shy baby that she still is! But she was a gifted writer long before she knew she wanted to be a gifted writer . . . Then and now, I was and am so proud of her accomplishments :-)

Why I Am Not a Writer!

More than a year after my one-and-only draft-but-not-published post on the Why I Am Not a Writer blog, the catalyst for launching this blog appeared on my doorstep this afternoon. Click the link above/below and check them out!

2 years later . . .

It all started so simply--a place where I could post our family photos, my son explained. Blogging was uncharted waters for me. I'd created an award-winning webpage for work several years earlier, using Netscape Composer, but this seemed, somehow, the greater challenge. Those first pictures of Michael were the only trace of this venture/adventure for months . . . until, tasked with creating a multigenre piece of writing around a theme of my choosing, the concept of capturing, of celebrating life's simple pleasures in a virtual writer's notebook took shape.

I have a new writing assignment this summer--a cultural autobiography. Not sure which virtual scrapbook I'll use for that--only that it will be more . . . private perhaps?

I've webpaged (two new sites at work this year), wikied (I'm a rank beginner but learning), Photostoried, and begun moving on to Smart notebooks and Movie makers . . .

In the fall, I'll coteach, for the first time in a long while, a technology course . . .

But writing for this blog has been, is, and will continue to be . . . a simple pleasure.

so many connections . . .THE LAST LECTURE

Alice Storytelling was the turning point.

Kimberly tried to talk about Randy Pausch's inspirational celebration of life just a few weeks ago . . . We looked at each other--my thyroid-cancer-survivor child-heroine and I, daughter of another brave man who lost his battle with Randy's nemesis when he was Randy's age. We looked at each other. . . and moved on to safer thoughts, thoughts that would not drown us in memories old and not yet old enough.

I have run away from death and dying since losing Daddy, losing him the day Kimberly, his first grandchild, celebrated the six-month anniversary of her arrival in our lives.

But the connections were much too powerful this time. The Carnegie-Mellon connection--Kimberly's and Albrecht's alma mater. And Alice Storytelling, reminders of my own brief, unintentional-yet-intense love affair with artifical intelligence, the LISP parser, Kimberly's following that whimsical lead of mine into her own cognitive science major at CMU. Not that either of us continued down that particular road. But technology--the technology of storytelling--courses through our veins even now.

And the rocket on the cover of Randy's book? Man first stepped on the moon Daddy's last summer on our Earth. Jamie, his grandson and namesake, majored in aerospace engineering. His greatgrandsons are growing up even now with stars in their eyes, solar systems on their ceilings. Astronauts have signed books on our shelves, pictures on our walls. . .

I've downloaded Alice Storytelling--to unzip and explore another day perhaps. I smiled when I read it came with no support, to use at my own risk. Sentence-combining software memories, the stuff of which a PhD was crafted all those years ago on that whimsical path of mine. I'm not afraid of Alice, not at all. Maybe not even of dying, so much . . .

I've ordered Randy's book, two days in print and already backordered at Amazon.com.

I will read his book. I will celebrate his life. I will hope, when my turn comes to let go of the light, to make the most of that experience too. . .

April showers . . .

Strange week . . . I'm feeling a little like the weather tonight--drizzled. Just enough of a question mark in my life--maybe a fork or two in the road ahead--to make finishing seem more important than beginning.

I think when I look back on this year I'll smile at the organized butterfly I've almost become. Taking stock isn't a bad thing, even if doing so much of it all at one time feels a little out of character.

And there's still time for play. I finally succumbed, after a couple of months of the free daily online jigsaw, and bought a set of 50 digital puzzles yesterday (and have already completed 4!). And Kira should have plenty of whatever that Webkinz currency is called now that she's addicted me to Cash Cow, versions 1 and 2! Still trying to figure out the Monkey game . . .

But there's more to life than playing on a virtual playground. I'm playing in real time with the "babies" Saturday morning so that their daddy can finish his kitchen renovations (speaking of which, but that's 1,001 and counting on my priority list so I won't go there, yet).

Michael doesn't know it but he's about to get introduced to the virtual playground too--his very own first Webkin (a beagle like his Lucy and everyone's Snoopy) and other birthday secrets. Shhh, don't tell him! Can't believe he's almost 4 . . .

Also on the weekend's agenda: planting more roses (they keep appearing on my doorstep, but I'm not complaining).

Off to spend the day with a real author tomorrow, the third time in a month. Am I jaded or what?

One day, maybe, I'll take that fork in the road, the writingabook path. Or maybe not. . .

Definitely drizzled tonight!

this should be on my other blog. . .

. . . where I have nothing posted! I did have a letter there--draft mode only. A response to a long-ago episode (being rejected for a freshman creative writing class with a famous author) that deflated my aspirations of becoming a famous author in my own right. . . I did share that experience with colleagues, and the author, last fall.

Enough said on that account!

Writing that letter last June was catharsis. I understand now that the decision not to write was and is mine. Which may be why, the last morning of this week's state conference, I sat among writers and wanna-be-writers to soak in the wisdom and experiences and advice of yet another published author, author of adult novels such as those I aspired so long ago to write.

It's no longer so much about being a published writer as it is about understanding how one gets there--the process. And about figuring out where, at seventeen, I went wrong.

This is some of what I learned.

• Don't base a novel on personal experiences. Who would care except me, anyway? And the danger is that, like in most of my writing, I'd be writing just for that audience of one: me. That's OK in a blog or writer's notebook but would be a profound waste of time over 10 drafts of a 300-page novel, don't you think? I do. . .
• Capitalize on my strengths as a researcher: that was sooooooooooooo validated yesterday :-)
• Make the audience (and, first of all, myself) really care about my characters. That matters more than anything.
• Let the setting lead (a place to use some of that research) and the characters react to it.
• Keep chapters short, even in a long book, and avoid long stretches of description or dialogue.
• Use simile to show the native intelligence and wit of characters whose spoken language is not SAE. Use dialect sparingly, if at all.
• When you don't know what to write next, write about the weather. . .
• When you don't know what to write next, read.
• READ NOVELS WRITTEN FOR ADULTS BY AUTHORS WHOSE CRAFT IS WORTH STUDYING (which means varying my too-longstanding diet of YA novels and professional texts).
• Read a lot of poetry.

I'm sure there's more in my notes, but this is what I still remember, one day and one cover-to-cover professional book later.

Will I ever publish that best-selling adult novel?

Probably not. . .

Do I feel more validated, more empowered, understanding what the process of getting there would (or would have) required?

Yes!