That's Good

Things are whirring along this semester. It's hard to believe it's already almost midterm - today was the first day of real (meaning "graded") speeches in speech class and the first exam in PR class. I've also been busy with my book since making the decision to publish it. I've finished the interior layout with InDesign and am now creating the cover in my spare time. Who knew there were so many decisions to agonize over, such as whether Adobe Garamond Pro or Californian FB is the better font, or whether a small drawing I made for the title page will make the book look "homemade," as my mother says? It reminds me of a line from a song on Barbra Streisand's Broadway album - "Every minor detail is a major decision...."

While all that's going on, I've also been trying to figure out exactly what to do with the ending of my second book. One morning I sent my sister (who is a wonderful sounding board for ideas) an email that began, "I need you to help me kill someone." I needed a believable way for someone in a rural setting to die in the early nineteenth century - disease? Accident?

I won't go into what we decided. But the conversation with her led me to another conversation with my husband in which he helped me work out the specifics of how this death could happen. Between the two of them, I have a pretty good idea of how this character is going to meet her demise.

The whole experience made me remember one of my favorite scenes from Shakespeare in Love:


Many thanks to my two incarnations of Kit Marlowe for all their inspiration!

Bad Selfies, Part 2

Wow, has it really been so long since I put up the first post about my bad selfies? I've got to get us back home on that trip!

When last we checked in, the hardy travelers were in San Francisco. That wasn't our penultimate destination, however; we had been dreaming of Yosemite since last December. What awesome scenery--this is a case when the word "awesome" is not an overstatement.

I call this one "Two Half Domes."

We camped for two nights at Yosemite. Originally, we had reserved three nights, but we decided to leave a night early for a couple of reasons--one, it was pretty darn chilly to a bunch of Southerners! and two, a family with a toddler boy camped beside us (and the campsites were practically on top of each other). The toddler boy was not a happy camper, let me tell you. So we packed up and drove over Tioga Pass Road. The big tourist attractions are down in the Yosemite Valley, but I believe I was more wowed by the starkness and immensity of the landscape going over the mountains. Incredible.

This picture is from a case of serendipity. When we were thinking about leaving Yosemite early, we asked a guide at the pioneer village on the southern end for his advice as to whether we should go to Glacier Point. He suggested if we left Yosemite early, we should go a little out of our way to see Bodie State Park. After going over Tioga Pass, we took a jag to the north and east into some pretty desolate countryside to the state park, which is a true ghost town, not a commercialized site. Bodie was a gold mining town that apparently had a very rowdy reputation. In the mid-twentieth century, it just dried up and everyone left. The state of California bought the town site years later and just left things the way they were. For our family, it was a stop worth making. You can't really get in any of the buildings except a small museum, but it is cool to wander around and peek in windows and see the stuff people left behind (and some of what they left was surprising).

We drove along the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada, then spent the night in a hotel in Lone Pine, CA, a little town near the edge of Death Valley. Our plan was to hit the road early in the morning and cross Death Valley before it got hot. I suppose we were successful; it was only 107 degrees when we got to the visitor's center on the eastern side.

Death Valley was really not what we had expected it to be. I think we had visions of a huge, sandy desert, something like the Sahara. Instead, there were lots of really stark mountains. I keep using that word "stark," but that's what it is.

We hit two of the national parks in Utah, Zion National Park and Arches National Park. The scope of the arches is unreal.

Our last major stop along the way was Mesa Verde National Park. We really wanted to go back here because we had visited Mesa Verde in 2000, when my daughter was only 18 months old. Back then, just as we got to the highlight of the tour (the Cliff Palace), Lily got fussy, and I carried her out of the area to keep from ruining the tour for everyone else. How on earth did I carry a toddler up those narrow, steep ladders?? Anyway, she was much better behaved this time. 

This last picture is not a selfie, but it marks one of the most memorable moments of the trip. Another of the sites we visited in 2000 was Clayton Lake State Park in New Mexico, which has some dinosaur footprints that were uncovered when the lake was being built. We had taken a picture of the kids by the prints, and we thought it would be fun to recreate that picture 13 years later. Well, as we were driving to the middle of nowhere to get to Clayton Lake, a big storm was building. We had driven through some hail and extremely heavy rain earlier in the afternoon, so we knew this was a severe storm. We got to the park and started trying to find the footprints. They were about 3/4 of the way around the lake on a nice hiking trail--nice, that is, if you're not watching a severe storm get closer and closer. We finally got there, hurried up the picture, and headed back around the lake. That's when we started seeing streaks of lightning. Lily and I ran most of the way back around the lake--not an easy thing for a 50-year-old woman, let me tell you, but definitely preferable to being caught out in a storm! The landscape out there is so huge, though, that we got back to town, got some food, and headed out of town to spend the night in Oklahoma before the storm arrived. But as we drove across that extremely flat landscape, my husband and son swore they could see a funnel cloud dangling out of the front edge of the storm. 

I hope you enjoyed the selfies, and I hope you will take some of your own and share them with me!

I Did It - I Jumped Off the Cliff

If you've read many posts on this blog, you know that I've been writing a book for a long time now--the nine-year anniversary is coming up next spring. That doesn't mean I've been writing it for nine years; for most of that time, I've been editing and trying to find something to do with it once it is "finished." I've submitted to carefully-targeted audiences--publishing companies, large and small, as well as agents--with no real success (although some people wrote very nice rejection letters mixed in among the great number of people who simply didn't respond). I finally decided if this book is ever going to see the outside of my flash drive, I'll have to publish it myself.

Even knowing that truth, I procrastinated. "I don't know enough." "I'm not sure the book is good enough." "I don't want to take money away from the family to do this." And the big one--"I just don't have time." But some events have come together in the past month that are wiping out my excuses. Someone in the publishing industry read the manuscript recently and advised me that she believes the book is "good enough" and people will actually want it. I ended up with a small stipend for some work I did this summer that was twice what I had expected, and, oddly enough, is just enough to cover the costs of getting the book out to the public. I've ended up with an unusually small speech class this semester, which means grading time is cut in half.

I think Someone is trying to tell me something.

So....I just jumped off the cliff. I bought ISBNs. Ten of them.

Bad Selfies on Vacation

This past June, my family took "The Last Great Family Vacation." That's what I called it anyway, mostly in jest, since our son would be starting college at the end of the summer and may not ever go on vacation with us again. Since it was "The Last Great," we made it a big one--two weeks on the road, with Yosemite National Park as our ultimate destination before we started back home. However, since it was the first trip into California, we hit all the major spots along the way, both on the way west and on the way back home.

I've had a sort of running joke with my Communication students. When we talk about symbols in Intro to Rhetoric class, I use my vacation experience as a way to explain indexicality. Every time the family goes on vacation, I tell the students, I have someone in the family take one picture of me to prove I was actually on the trip. The rest of the time, I'm behind the camera, being the "journalist" of the vacation.

One of our first real stops on this summer's trip was at El Morro National Monument in New Mexico. I love the pool of water at the monument--it is the first good source of water pioneers had as they were crossing the desert, and a number of them left their names carved into the relatively soft stone of the huge mountain above the pool. It's just a cool place, and I decided to take my one picture there. Except everyone else in the family had already moved on. I didn't want to call them back just to take a picture of me. Hey, everyone is taking selfies these days, right? So I took a selfie in front of the pool.

It was awful. I think I cut off the top of my head or something. So I deleted it and took off to catch up with the rest of the family.

At some point riding through the desert, though, I came up with what I thought was a great idea. What if having a bad selfie was the point? That it didn't matter what the "selfie" part looked like as long as the attraction showed up well in the picture. It would still act as an index proving I was on the trip, and it might be kind of funny to see how bad my selfies could be.

So I started taking bad selfies at every stop. My daughter finally started helping me line them up so the attraction looked good and I wouldn't have to take a dozen pictures to get the best of the bad. It was fun to document the trip this way. Usually I hate being in pictures, but who cares what I looked like in these? They were supposed to be bad, anyway!

I've been meaning all summer to share a travelogue of our trip through an exhibit of bad selfies. Now that we are at the "official" end of summer, Labor Day, I present.....

BAD SELFIES ON VACATION!

I wish I had thought of doing this before we visited the Grand Canyon, but my first bad selfie was at the Hoover Dam. Not a bad place to start, I guess.

This picture doesn't begin to capture the awesomeness of the Trail of 100 Giants in the Sequoia National Forest.

First view of the Pacific Ocean at Sunset State Beach near Watsonville, CA. There were a lot of clouds that evening, which I suppose "ruined" the sunset, but which I thought made for some rather dramatic pictures.

San Francisco was cool. We were there for only an afternoon, so we went to Fisherman's Wharf.

Of course, we took a ride on the cable cars. It was a really memorable experience - I didn't realize the cable cars share the streets with regular traffic, ha ha.

Well, the computer won't let me upload any more pictures for some reason, so I'll have to continue tomorrow.

Is This a Great First Line or What?

Friday night after the matriculation ceremony at my school, I met my husband and daughter at a restaurant for dinner. The whole time, my daughter hardly said two words because she had her nose buried in a book, which turned out to be A Drowned Maiden's Hair by Laura Amy Schlitz. She finished it today and was raving about it, and since I was between books, I asked if she could keep it out of the school library long enough for me to read it too.

I started it tonight, and I was hooked from the first line.

On the morning of the best day of her life, Maud Flynn was locked in the outhouse, singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

What masterful technique! This sentence foreshadows what's going to happen, hints at backstory, introduces the protagonist, and gives us an idea of her personality. Plus, it makes me so curious I must read on.

Ah, but therein lies the problem! This is really not a good time for a book that grabs me by the imagination and won't let go......I should be writing syllabi......

What a Contrast!

I've finished two books within the past week, which is kind of unusual. I guess I'm procrastinating on putting together the syllabi for my classes (yes, school starts again on Tuesday, sniff, sniff). The first book, 10 Cents a Dance by Christine Fletcher, is one I've had on my to-read list for quite a while after finding it during a browsing session on Amazon; the other, Love Comes Softly by Jannette Oke, is an ebook I checked out of the local library when I was trying to figure out how to check out books with my Kindle app. Both of them lean heavily on romantic elements, but that's about where the similarities end.

I have to admit, of the two, I much preferred 10 Cents a Dance. Much. It's the story of a half-Polish, half-Irish girl living in Chicago at the verge of World War II. Ruby's widowed mother is suffering from rheumatoid arthritis and so can no longer work to support the family. That means Ruby has to drop out of high school and work in the local meat-packing factory, which she hates, of course. But Ruby loves to dance, and when someone tells her she could make a lot of money at the Starlight "dance academy," she quits her day job and begins working at night as a taxi dancer for a nickel a dance and tips. (That's the only thing that bugged me - why is the book called 10 Cents a Dance when Ruby's salary was 5 cents a dance??? But anyway....)

The problem is, there's no way Ruby's strict Irish Catholic mother is going to go for her daughter working as a taxi dancer, which most people viewed as one step away from prostitution. So Ruby concocts a web of lies that her mother doesn't try too hard to pierce through, especially once Ruby is bringing in enough money to buy groceries and winter coats AND pay off the back rent.

This story was challenging. Some unpleasant things happen to Ruby, not the least of which is (SPOILER!) being beat up by her boyfriend. There's portrayal of racism and interracial relationships. There's the struggle Ruby faces between going far enough to get good tips and crossing the line into going too far. And all the way through, there is the tension of whether Ruby's lies will be found out and what the cost of those lies will be to her family. It's the kind of book that had me thinking about it for a good couple of days after I finished.

Love Comes Softly....well, granted, it's a different genre, Christian fiction, so Marty, the heroine, doesn't deal with life the same way Ruby does. Marty was on her way out West with her husband when he is killed in an accident, leaving her alone and pregnant. A local man who helped with the burial comes to Marty and makes a very forward proposition - his wife has died recently and he needs a mother for his young daughter. If Marty will marry him and be that mother, he will provide a home and food for her, with no expectation that she will be a "real" wife to him. Not having a lot of choice in a land of strangers, Marty agrees.

The remainder of the book shows how "Love Comes Softly" to overtake Marty, healing her loss and giving her a chance at a good life with a happy family and a loving husband. It's a sweet story.

So why do I much prefer the challenging story?

Waste Not, Want Not

Just about the only thing that is doing very well in my garden this year is the squash, both yellow crookneck and zucchini. For a while, I was diligent about getting rid of the squash bug eggs on the leaves (I've not been so good at that lately). The result is that I've accumulated quite a bit of squash, even with giving some to a couple of people at church. As of yesterday, I had four shopping bags' worth of squash in my refrigerator, which doesn't leave much room for other food! We've been eating a lot of squash, too - fried with a light cornmeal breading, crusted with parmesan cheese and broiled, raw in a salad, in a skillet sauteed with other veggies. At one point, we had squash of some kind for four of five meals (breakfast was the exception, ha ha).

Last night when I was making the rounds to check the garden, I found the zucchini in the picture above hiding discreetly under a couple of big leaves. The picture really doesn't do justice to the size of this squash. It it 15 inches long and probably four inches in diameter. It's definitely what my family refers to as a zucchini "club."

I always joke that I "grew up in the Great Depression," so I just couldn't stand to just throw it away. Because it will have big, more mature seeds, it won't be suited for frying or broiling. I've seen recipes using shredded zucchini, though, including one for brownies. So I made a batch this afternoon, without telling the family. (My daughter came in and caught me making them, so I had her help out and share the secret.) They are actually pretty good - the zucchini is not obvious.

It was priceless when my son realized these weren't ordinary brownies. I said something about "Mom's special brownies with an organic ingredient I grew myself," and he got this incredulous look on his face and said, "Zucchini? You put zucchini in them?" We all got a laugh. He says he's going to take some to band camp with him tomorrow and share the fun.

But can they compete with the return of Twinkies????