K.B. Inglee's Blog: The Shepherd's Notes, page 14

Spring means the Boston Marathon

I wrote this on Wednesday, after the Marathon bombings but before the city was locked down, and we followed the news minute by minute to make sure our friends, family and heritage were all OK.
I've never run, but I have followed it closely. I remember how shocked I was when the first African won. He was not the first citizen of another country to run or win, merely the first I was aware of. This thing must be a big deal.
When I was in my 30s I had a friend who ran, and she told us all the things she had to do to prepare for it. I wanted to run too, but I knew I would never even get thought training.
I had maps of the route, but I stayed home on race day because of the traffic. Had I gone, I would have gone not to the finish line but to the start. That always seemed more exciting to me.
When I think about running, I can feel every item of clothing chafing, feet that I don't even want to put down, and dragging over the finish line five hours or more after the start, if I got there at all.
The Marathon is run on Patriots Day, a holiday unique to Boston. (Someone told me it is recognized in two other places) It celebrates the Battles of Lexington and Concord.
For me all of Boston history is of a piece, a quilt made of individual events. Bright colored or faded, but bits I recognize and cherish. The Marathon is one of those patches.
I think I will go listen to Three Places in New England by Charles Ives.

There's more to writing

I have been taking an on line course in blog writing. Well, I signed up for it but I haven’t been very active. I got to lesson three, printed it out and mixed up the pages. I couldn’t make the lesson fit what I was doing on the screen (well, of course not, I was doing it in the wrong order). At that point my life got really busy and I was never able to sit down and find out where I was. The class is now up to lesson six and I am stuck on three. I did get a nice photo of me with a chicken posted, but nothing else.
The plan was for me and my daughter to do a blog together. Since we write in very different genre, this would give us a chance to appear together.
There is so much more to writing than just putting words one after the other. I don’t always like that extra stuff.

Eating what you catch

Since I started doing historical interpretation one of my goals has been to get people to realize that food doesn’t start out in plastic packages at the grocery store. The site where I work has fish ponds where the public can catch rainbow trout on weekends. Many of the people who come to fish, have no intention of eating what they catch. I am happy to take fish that the families don’t want to keep. I will even clean them myself. I delight in the fresh fillets, four from each fish.
Yesterday, Easter, was the exception. We had a man show up the minute we opened ready to catch an Easter dinner for his family. He went away with seven trout. His family had the freshest dinner of anyone I know.
Who goes out these days to bring home dinner fresh from the stream?

The Anthology Game

Sometime in the in the next few months two (maybe three) of my stories will be coming out in anthologies. In two cases I am intimately involved in the production of the books. Why do I keep volunteering for these things?
Fish Nets required the most work. I was the touch point between the writers and the editor. When everything was set, I put the manuscript together and sent it off. I didn't have anything to do with the publisher, so no contracts, no Okaying the cover, no marketing plan.
For Death Knell V, I agreed to do the set up for the publisher. I put the stories in order and made the formatting uniform throughout. It is amazing how many different ways an author can format a story and still be well within the guidelines.
There are four different ways to indicate a paragraph breaks. There are endless numbers of fonts. I was taught to use a double space after a period, but that is passé, so I had to take one space out at the end of each sentence.
I had done all this before but not at the same time for both anthologies.
If I survive this, I may never work on another anthology. But the rainbow at the end is more published stories.

Significant Birthdays

We aren’t much at celebrations in our house. You might or might not get a birthday cake. We decorate for Christmas, but barely. My daughter likes Halloween, so her room is filled with orange candles, black cats, plates in the shape of jack-o-lanterns, but she never puts them away.
A month or so before a significant birthday I think I ought to do something to celebrate it, but when it comes down to in, I don't see the point. You only have to clean it all up afterwards. Forget about getting anyone to surprise me. The only thing less important than their birthdays is mine. I will be 72 this week and somehow this seems important. I have given out instructions to family members and they have sent out invitations.
The thing that worries me now, given how unimportant birthdays are, is that no one will come.

Playing Scrabble

A dear friend gave me an electronic version of Scrabble. I have always been a poor speller and my parents bought the board game when it first came out, thinking it would help me spell better. What really happened was that not only did my spelling not improve, I became more aware of how bad it was. "You can't spell a simple word like 'their'?" I hated being laughed at. I didn't find out why spelling was so hard until I was in graduate school taking an early education class. So when the disk came, I put it aside for a long time. It was only the fact that I had to tell the giver that I had played it that made me open it at all. I discovered a couple of things. The computer never laughed at me for my stupid mistakes, so I got bolder. The second was that for every game played, I did about two hours of inspired writing.
So, up in the morning, walk the dog, feed the sheep, play a couple of games of Scrabble and write for two hours.

Everything is a Story

I have been working with the sheep in one capacity or another for over 10 years. This winter we had our first dog attack. We got the emergency call just after dark and when I showed up at the barn, I could find only 6 of the 9 sheep. I walked as much of the pasture as I could with my feeble flashlight and couldn't find the other three. One of the missing had to be the injured sheep, since I saw no blood at all.
Turns out the other three were huddled at the far end of the enclosure, with two of the more aggressive ones (yes, aggressive sheep) were protecting the injured one. Poor sheep.
The injury was bloody but not serious. A bit of a clean up and a scrub with betadine and she was fine.
Needless to say I was a bit shaken up over all this. So I went home and wrote a short story in which a man trains his father's dog to be a killer and practices on sheep until his father falls victim. Poor dog.

For Robin

This morning I received word that Robin Hathaway had died. It was not unexpected; still it was a jolt to those of us who knew her.
I went to my first writers’ conference in the mid 1990s. I knew one published writer and one illustrator. Like many writers I am pretty shy. I made a bunch of resolutions before I went and kept them pretty well. I would seek out and talk to the writers who caught my ear during sessions. Robin was one of those authors.
When I got home I joined Sisters in Crime and was delighted to find out that Robin was in my Chapter.
I read and loved her books, went to every appearance that was near enough for me to get to, and hung on her every word. She was endlessly generous, friendly and helpful to a beginning writer and I imagine I was not the only one.
She is already missed, and not just by me.

For Betsy

One of the skills every writer needs to develop is the ability to be open to criticism. I have been in one critique group or another for over ten years. I have sent my stuff out to editors, some of whom were helpful, some not so helpful. I know the three basic errors I make over and over and can't seem to correct. I have learned that what makes me angry is usually the things I have to work on.
I had struggled with a short story for the whole month of January and I was really really proud of it. My critique group had torn it apart and I had put it back together. Then I sent it to my final reader sure I would get back a few useful comments. What I got was "This is not up to your usual standards." Darn if she wasn't right.
What surprised me was not so much that she had found fault with my most perfect story, but that I was truly grateful for her honesty. A writer can't do better than to have an honest critic.

Me and Prince Leopold

Our local classical music radio station is having its fall fund drive. A bit of money comes out of my account every month to pay for the music I enjoy so much. As I put on my period clothing to do my bit with the mill and the flock, I realize that the people I represent, while they lived at the time much of this music was written, probably never heard a note of it. If my stove, hot water heater and refrigerator were taken away from me I could survive. I might not be comfortable and you can bet I’d make a great fuss, but I’d survive. Take away my access to music, and I might not. Besides the music itself, it gives me great joy to consider myself a patron, like the well-to-do supported it in the 18th and 19th centuries.