Marian Allen's Blog, page 403

More Folks To Follow

Like you don’t already have more cool blogs to look at than you have time for, right? Well, here are some more. You’ll thank me later.

The multi-talented Dani Greer has a blog I didn’t know about called News From Nowhere: Views on Writing, Crafting, Gardening, Living, Loving. She’s participating in the A-to-Z Blog Challenge, so you get a new nugget of goodness every day this month!

Another participant is author/artist Mary Montague Sikes on her Notes Along the Way. She’s DOING A PAINTING EVERY DAY!

Author Christopher Kokoski is not taking part in the challenge, but his posts are always interesting, for readers as well as for writers.

A wonderful young friend of mine, Eleanor Scott, writes a column for Metropulse about life as she sees it. It’s great stuff. Here’s one called The Weeds of Civilization about daffodils. And here’s an even better one called Shooting the Moon about good neighbors in a “bad” neighborhood. That, my friends, is writing.

A WRITING PROMPT FOR YOU: What is life like in your neighborhood? In the one where you grew up? How about your characters’ neighborhoods?

MA

Things That Never End

The Pete and Repeat joke:

Pete and Repeat were sitting on a fence. Pete fell off, so who was left?

Repeat.

Pete and Repeat were sitting on a fence. Pete fell off and who was left?

Repeat.

Pete and Repeat….

The story about the Cowboys Sat By A Campfire Bright:

Three cowboys sat by a campfire bright and one of them said, “Joe, tell us a story!” and this is what he told:

Three cowboys sat by a campfire bright and one of them said, “Joe, tell us a story!” and this is what he told:

The story about One Dark Night Outside The Gates of Paris: (Too long. Plus: I don’t remember exactly how it starts. I’ll get Mom to tell me and post it another time.)

This song:

My knitting.

Lucky for me, I knit because I enjoy the process. This scarf has a pattern to it so, every time I make a mistake — or suspect I may have made a mistake — I have to unravel it to the beginning so I can start counting rows all over again. The paper you see there is the pattern, which I impaled on one of the needles so it can’t get away from me. The red and white thing is my row counter. The neat winding is the lot I haven’t gotten to yet — indeed, may never get to — and the messy lot is my unraveling. The tiny little bit on the other needle is the pitiful amount I have done this time around.

If I ever finish this scarf, I will definitely post a picture.

What else can you think of that never ends?

A WRITING PROMPT FOR YOU: How does your main character react to a setback in a project? Does the size or importance of the project make a difference, or is a little one as bad as a major one? ~cough~Mr. Monk~cough~

MA

Gooooood Broccoli

The Humana Active Outlook magazine printed some recipes from Maggie Green’s THE KENTUCKY FRESH COOKBOOK, and Charlie actually tore a couple out and gave them to me. We’ve had this broccoli dish a couple of times and really like it. I’m putting this book on my wish list!

Naturally, I don’t make it exactly the way the cookbooks instructs, because that’s the kind of hairpin I am.

ROAST BROCCOLI AND ALMONDS

Broccoli florets
garlic-infused olive oil
Mrs. Dash Onion and Herb seasoning
sliced or slivered almonds

Wash the broccoli. Toss with a bit of the olive oil and seasoning mix. Microwave for about one minute. Add almonds and a touch more olive oil and toss until well mixed. Should not be sloppy with oil, just barely glazed. Bake at 450F for about 10 minutes, until the broccoli starts to brown.

SO GOOD!

A WRITING PROMPT FOR YOU: Does your main character eat fresh with the seasons, or fancy imported or preserved foods?

MA

 

Very Inspiring Blogger, Me

Fellow author Katherine Vucicevic has given me The Very Inspiring Blogger Award. Not for my posts on this blog, but on The Write Type. Nonetheless, it’s the V. I. BLOGGER Award, not BLOG Award, so I’m bringin’ it home.

RULES:

Display the award logo on your blog.
State SEVEN facts about yourself.
Link back to the person who had already nominated you.
Nominate seven other bloggers who deserve this award. (Some say fifteen, but that’s Award Bloat — it was originally SEVEN)
Notify each of the bloggers of your nomination.

One and three — DONE

Seven facts about myself:

I have never seen the movie TITANIC.
Before I started school, I would draw pages and pages of random letters, hoping some of them would form stories. And I had never heard of the Shakespearean Monkeys theory. I also never formed stories that way. It always has to be work.
I don’t like work.
Nevertheless, I love to write. Approach-Avoidance Conflict, anyone?
The best part about writing is the research. I can spend all day reading cool junk and justify it.
The second best part about writing is sitting very still and staring into space and having people understand it as working.
Everything is about writing. That is all.

There are a million billion bloggers who have inspired me. These are only seven of them.

Pat Bean – Pat Bean’s Blog. When I first started reading her, she was living in an RV, driving all over the country with her traveling companion, an aging dog named Maggie. Now Pat is reasonably stationary, with a young dog named Pepper, but she still inspires me with her photography and wisdom.
Sarah E. Glenn – The Sinister Scribblings of Sarah E. Glenn. When Sarah’s parents needed help, Sarah and her wife, Gwen Mayo, left their home, their jobs, their local friends, and their professional networks to move to another part of the country. When their publisher (they each write) folded, they formed their own indie press. Sarah inspires me in SO many ways!
Jean Yates – Snap out of it, Jean! There’s beading to be done! Jean is enthusiastic about what she loves and what irritates her. Even on my most down of down days, Jean can cheer me up. Her emotional honesty touches me and refreshes me.
Kat French – That Darn Kat. Kat is good at everything she does. If she doesn’t know how to do something she wants to do, she learns how! She’s even genuinely humble about it, which ought to be irritating, but isn’t. Wonderful writer. Inspiring blogger. Good friend.
Charmaine Clancy – Wagging Tales. When I first started reading Charmaine Clancy’s blog, she was working on a book. Now she’s multiply published and the book she was working on, MY ZOMBIE DOG, remains the only zombie book I will ever love.
Fiona Young-Brown – Wandering Fi. I “met” Fiona through a Yahoo group, then met her in person at Fandom Fest in Louisville. She just realized a long-time dream and visited Africa to work with non-human primates. What’s more inspiring than living your dream, as I do every day I write?
Alicia McCalla – Fantasy, Futuristic, and Paranormal Love Stories in Color. A blog challenging blinkered thinking. Truly multicultural and exhilarating in its dedication to unpacking the cultural backpacks we all carry without realizing it. Plus, she uses the Oxford comma.

Look these folks up, and see if they don’t inspire you, too.

Meanwhile, it’s Tuesday, and I’m posting at Fatal Foodies on the subject of Crack — Soda Cracker Chocolate Candy, that is.

A WRITING PROMPT FOR YOU: Who inspires your main character? Someone he or she knows personally, or a public figure?

MA

Broken Doesn’t Mean Destroyed

I loved doing the April A-to-Z Blogging Challenge, but this year I’m taking part in The 5-2: Crime Poetry Weekly’s 30 Days of the 5-2 Blog Tour in honor of National Poetry Month. The 5-2 is a site of poetry about crime.

Now, you might think that crime poetry is all: “I hit her head/And now she’s dead,” but you would be wrong. Take, for example, the delicate, horrible, and moving poem I chose to feature, “Broken Sestina for Mary Bell” by Cassandra de Alba. Take a few minutes to follow the link and read it. I’ll wait.

First, let me say that I love the way de Alba juxtaposes the child committed for the crime with the adult whose life is overturned by her being identified as that child criminal. Mary Bell was a real person who really murdered two younger children. de Alba simply shows a girl who is as sickened and baffled as anyone else at what she has done, then shows a loving mother faced with the necessity of explaining to her own child why their lives are being disrupted. de Alba saves Bell’s only insight for the last line.

The poem is brilliantly constructed, including the “broken” part of the sestina.

A sestina is a poem using an intricate pattern of six recurring end words. The words de Alba chooses are: hands, home, boys, mirrors, face, girl.

She “breaks” the pattern in two ways: Until the envoi (the final three lines), she consistently puts “boys” where “mirrors” should be and vice-versa; she sometimes substitutes another word for the end word (“I” and “daughter” for “girl”, “reporter” for “mirror”, “house” for “home”).

The envoi pulls it all together. In the envoi, de Alba uses all six words, as the form requires, but not in the way the form designates. That, too, pulls the poem together.

It takes a broken sestina to touch broken lives: the boys’, their mothers’, the girl’s, the girl-as-woman’s, her daughter’s. Most important and, I think, most meaningful, the broken pattern of the poem mirrors (yes, I used that word intentionally) the broken pattern of the girl’s life. She says she never had a home, she calls her adult home a “house”, but she has seen to it that her daughter thinks of it as a “home”. At some point between the time she did the unthinkable and the time her adult self was identified as a “monster”, she found a way to create normalcy and security.

One is not asked to pity Mary Bell, to forgive her, or even to understand her. One is asked only to look at her. Then to look in a mirror, perhaps.

A WRITING PROMPT FOR YOU: Read the poem again.

MA

From @Madratlady Comes the Best. Email. Ever!

My new internet friend, Andrea Gilbey, likes my writing, which makes me very happy. She recently read LONNIE, ME AND THE HOUND OF HELL and sent me this:

I. Love. It.

So much I could drool over, but a few prize snippets; my favourite has to be Dog Star, I love the “dog speak” and their interactions.

Balance of Power, the description of Shisha’s eyes is so perfectly aquatic.

High Stakes – I love the Damon Runyon-esque speech, and placing a vampire in a retro boutique; genius, who would notice? Ever been to Kensington Market in London? You’d be hard pressed to say whether any of the stall holders there had been alive in the past 60 years!

And Sledgehammer is, to me, a written impression of the picture in my mind when I hear this.

Jean Sibelius – Karelia – Intermezzo I

I’ve always imagined it as a scene in dark woodland, with a sledge appearing, a battle of some kind, (ok, maybe zombies weren’t exactly what Sibelius had in mind), a joyful victory, and a tired retreat.

Normally with a book of short stories by the same author I need a breather between them, so as not to confuse the characters and plots, but your stories are all so different, the voices, the characters and the plots and ideas.

You know how with some writers you know what “the new Fred Bloggs novel” is going to be about before you read it? Not with you. There is no such thing as “a Marian Allen type story” unless that means intriguing, thought provoking, funny, moving….

Like, WOW! You get an email like that, you can’t wear pullovers for a week or until the swelling in your head goes down.

So THANKS, Andrea, for such kind words. You know how writers sometimes say stuff about how pleasing their readers is what makes writing worthwhile? Well, it’s true.

A WRITING PROMPT FOR YOU: What makes your character’s work or volunteering worthwhile?

MA

#Caturday – The Greatest Item Ever Sold

BEHOLD!!!

The only thing that would make this better would be if Johnny Depp and Alan Rickman were fighting over which one got to make me a present of it.

A WRITING PROMPT FOR YOU: What would your main character consider the greatest item ever sold?

Where I Am and Am Not

This weekend, I’m at ConGlomeration sf convention in Louisville, Kentucky. If you’re there — or here, as the case may be — drop by the Hydra Publications table and say howdy. A bunch of us Hydrites will be there signing our various books and generally carrying on.

Where I am not is doing the A-to-Z April Blogging Challenge. Nearly 2,000 bloggers are signed up, though; so, if you’ve been wanting to pop in on some blogs you don’t know yet, this challenge is a fine place to find some. Here are this year’s co-hosts:

The Madlab Post (Nicole Ayers)
Tossing It Out (Arlee Bird)
Amlokiblogs (Damyanti Biswas)
Alex J. Cavanaugh (Alex J. Cavanaugh)
Life is Good (Tina Downey)
Cruising Altitude 2.0 (DL Hammons)
Retro-Zombie (Jeremy Hawkins)
The Warrior Muse (Shannon Lawrence)
The QQQE (Matthew MacNish)
Leave it to Livia (Livia Peterson)
No Thought 2 Small (Konstanz Silverbow)
Breakthrough Blogs (Stephen Tremp)
Spunk on a Stick (L. Diane Wolfe)

Happy hopping!

A WRITING PROMPT FOR YOU: A character goes to a speed-dating evening.

MA

 

 

We Say Goodbye To Joe

About fifteen years ago, our oldest grandson (older son of #3 daughter) got a puppy and named him Jolteon, after a Pokemon anime character. When the puppy got too big to be a house dog, we took him to live with us in the country.

Over the years, Joe (as we called him) lived outside. When he first came, he terrorized the cats, until #1 daughter’s cat waded into him a couple of times. After that, he treated cats with respect. He even became besties with #4 daughter’s cat, Al. We would often look out and see Al and Joe curled up together on the deck.

I’ve posted quite a bit about Joe over the years. I’ve written about Joe’s love/hate relationship with the garden. I’ve written a poem about when Joe killed the neighbor’s rabbit. I wrote, when the Rapture was imminently anticipated, that I wasn’t going, if Joe couldn’t come with me.

Joe used to come mushroom hunting with me. Joe was totally no good at keep deer away from the yard. Ever.

He was my cover-boy for LONNIE, ME AND THE HOUND OF HELL, not because he was hellish, or even looked hellish. He just worked cheap.

Back in November of 2011, I posted about how Joe was getting old, and I needed to prepare for saying goodbye. And the time came, and we were relieved for him, and now we can’t look outside without thinking we see him or wondering where he is, and then remembering he’s gone. Rotten old dog. Who wanted him, anyway? ~sniffff~

A WRITING PROMPT FOR YOU: Write about a pet.

MA

The Colors In My Bowl

We all pitch in on family dinners, and I decided to take a salad. You know how to make a salad? You ask yourself three questions:

What have I got on hand?
What would look pretty together?
What would taste good together?

So I opened cans of corn, green beans, and kidney beans, sliced an onion, and diced a roasted red pepper (from a jar). I mixed two parts rice vinegar to one part sesame oil and added a teaspoon of sugar and a dash of Mrs. Dash Garlic and Herbs.

As Aunt Ora Mae would have said, “Now, ain’t that perty?”

It tasted as good as it looks, and it isn’t just me who says it: precious little of it came home from Easter. Mission accomplished.

A WRITING PROMPT FOR YOU: A character takes food to a pitch-in dinner and only one bite is eaten. Why?

MA