This Year's St. Nicholas Boxes

Being pressed for time, I couldn't paint my St. Nicholas box design this year.  Instead I drew and scanned it, then put it into the Windows Paint Program to color them and then did the rest as a word document and printed them at Kinko's. I was up late cutting them and gluing them (with Peter's help) I couldn't get gifts or bake the shortbread cookies that I put in the boxes--just that sort of year; but I did keep the tradition again this year--however minimal-- and passed them out to my coworkers on time.  I sure miss the years when my kids were little and all excited. They would get so jazzed.  So Elizabeth, if you are tuning in here, there's one for you when you come home for Christmas.

A Girl Named Ginny

It is the first Sunday of Advent and I'm not very functional and can't get all the work done to make this work.  I need candles for an Advent wreath and decorations and a thousand little details to take care of.  I've got a Sisyphean paper to do that I may not be able to finish.  I may kiss my 4.0 goodbye.  But I'm gonna' try. 

Most things about Christianity turn my stomach these days and that is largely due to so may denominations, mostly Protestant evangelicals, who can't seem to see how much they have confused their religion with political Conservative and would rather do law and conformity than celebrate love, freedom and dignity for all human beings.  It is a sad day when so many Christians have learned how to hate in the name of love; who blame the poor for being poor, calling them lazy and parasitical.  But, as the Bible says, the Lord hears the cries of the poor.

True religion is about compassion.  I did have time to write a song for this first week of Advent.  It is more of a Christmas song than an Advent song, but it dwells on the theme of compassion.  My piano, like me, is old and out of tune, but I'm so glad to have it.  The song takes place back in the days of abolition and well, nuff said.

I Have Friends

This post is for Melanie and all my friends over seas.  I had just a taste of adventure when I left for Abu Dhabi and lived there for nearly three years.  I met a lot of people who had been, and were going lots of places.  I miss them all and the adventures I had.  I have a lot of obligations now, and am trying to get a few more years built up for my retirement pay and benefits, (providing the republicans in the state of Michigan don't screw up all my years of efforts to establish what I've got).  But I hope that I might yet be able to go on a few more adventures before I shuffle off this mortal coil.  ;)

Four Ladies

I know a lady who's all dressed in green
With lavender trim and her face so serene.
I know a lady who's all dressed in gold
Sun-kissed,  red-headed, and happy, I'm told.
I know a lady who's all dressed in red
With apples and peaches on top of her head.
I know a lady who's all dressed in white
I need her to guide me through my longest night.

Four lovely ladies, who dance through the years.
they share all my laughter, my joys and my tears.
One brings new life.
One brings the sun.
One brings brings her bounty
One brings me peace, when I'm old and done.

Lakota

Several hundred dust devils, like fingers, were tracing their way across the drought-dead soil.  I tried to chase them, but I could never catch them.  Then I saw human shapes in those dust devils, formed out of bone-dry soil and air, dancing playfully.

"Who are you people?"

They ignored me.

"What are you people?" I whispered to myself this time.

I was thirsty.  Dust was sticking to my sweat.  I must have been delusional.  I followed.  God hep me, I followed.  For good or ill, I followed.

Visit with Doug and Point Pelee

Having finished summer school and with about two weeks to go before heading back to work, and not having had much of a vacation, I took a couple of days to get out and do something with what time I have.  I've got tons of work to do on this old house and all kinds of things I need to tend to.  BUT...I also have to attend to my need for some R & R.  So I decided to go visit a friend of mine from Abu Dhabi Days.  His name is Doug and he lives in Windsor with his sister, Pat.  So I took Peter with me and spent the day with Doug, who finally was able to return my long lost spatula that had vanished when I lived in Abu Dhabi.  It's been quite a quest to return the sacred spatula to the owner who's name is clearly written on the handle.  I will now associate it with Doug every time I grill hamburgers in honer of those marvelous cook outs he used ot host at the old villa.

I was worried that Peter would be bored, but he loved Doug's humor.  He chuckles even now at Doug's frequent use of "Shud up!" with his incredulous tone.  He also loved to hear the stories of people and  the things we had done during my time there.  Peter was just starting high school when I left to work in Abu Dhabi.  I had planned to be gone for just six months, but it turned out to be three years.  That was very painful for both Peter and me.  Don't get me wrong, I loved teaching the Arabs, I loved going on adventures, and I loved all the different cultures--I even loved the city of Abu Dhabi; but I worried, quite a bit, about Peter.  My daughter was in college and is great with Skype or gmail.  She'd check in all the time.  Peter needed my physical presence and that was the hardest thing for both of us.  He told me that listening me talk to Doug gave him a bigger picture of what life must have been like for me over there.

Doug took us to Amherstberg, to Fort Maldan.  It was an historical fort built by the British during the war of 1812.  The docents there were dress in clothing from that period and first greeted us in French.   We ambled about the fort and then stopped to watch a muzzle loading and firing demonstration, took our picture and then split for some of that wonderful Horton's coffee.  It seemed like a Tim Horton's coffee shop there is on just about every street corner. 

The following day we said goodbye to Doug and Pat and as I was leaving I missed the exit to the Ambassador Bridge and found myself back in Amhersburg again and said, "What the heck, let's just explore."  We ended up going to a wonderful place called Point Pelee.  It is a Canadian national park.  An isthmus that runs out into Lake Erie.  It looks to me, as I said in the video, like a wasp stinger. (Oh dang, I just realized that I misspelled "Lake Erie" on my map.  Isn't that eerie?  

What a beautiful place!  Butterflies were everywhere.  It was really hard to catch them on video, but I got a few.  I mention this because Pat told me that this is the place the Monarch Butterflies gather in mass before making their annual journey to Mexico.  I was also surprised to see cactus--I'm thinking they call these prickly pears, but I'm not sure.  according to the signs posted on the pathways, the isthmus is being restored to savanna.  All kinds of plants had been put there, along with many that I am familiar with. 



Peter and I walked all the way down to the point.  Most of the way we saw very few people.  The beach was empty and very remote, but when we got to the very tip, we saw a lot of people who took the shuttle who were now out wading in the water and taking pictures. It was a lovely place.  I have to say I enjoyed the hike even more.  We also went to the wetlands area while we were there.  It was a bit of a tourist kind of place, but I appreciated the effort to educate the public about the wetlands and I'm glad that places like this are protected.  Mostly I was just grateful for perfect weather, and time with Peter.

How to Make Wooden Spoons

I'm not a great carver.  I'm altogether too impatient, too clumsy and a bit too satisfied with less than perfect.  I also don't have all the tools I need to do it right  That said, carving is a lot of fun and another outlet for my insatiable need to be creative.  For this blog, I decided to share with you, dear readers, how I make my wooden spoons.  I made some these spoons quite a while back.  I also made some pretty nice wands for my family for the Harry Potter Book party when book six came out.  I was getting pretty good at carvings when I did the wands, now I'm working my way back to that level. 

For materials, mostly I just use a jig saw, a utility knife and an exacto-knife, some chisels and sand paper.  O, and for this project a 1" X 6" pine board.  That's pretty much it. 
When it comes to the video, I don't know what happened to a lot of what I recorded--it vanished!  My bytes must have been bitten!  I was going to make it all music and no words, but I liked my on running commentary.  Stop gaps, I don't explain well.  They are essential in carving.  What you do is to cut deep straight down into the wood across the grain.  Then when you cut the wood, you push your knife along the grain digging at an angle untill your knife hist the stop gap.  It keeps the kinf from going to far and cutting areas you want left higher.  You'll have to just watch and see how it's done.

Illustrations for Peter the Pirate

I recently ran across some old illustrations I did for my Peter the Pirate stories.  I drew them quite a while before I went off to the UAE. and they've been stored in a manilla envelope for nearly 5 years.  I took them and scanned them and then using those scans, I put backgound color to them on the powerpoint program so then had some color and mood to them. 

 

This is is from one of the Christmas stories called "Chirstmas Island" 
I never finished the illustration and I haven't put the story on the blog just yet

 

This is Peter talking to his dead mother in the underworld called "Dreamland"
Peter was taken from her when he was a boy by the British Navey.  Up until that time
she had been an American loyalist, but this practice of essentially kidnapping
young men to serve on the King's ship under inhuman conditions is one of many points
of contention that led to the eventual revolution.



This is the Botanist.  He was  naturalist and empiricist. 
He is another shade that Peter meets in the underworld.  The Botanist
lives on an Island of his own creation, but refuses to believe he is
dead, choosing to still live according to the rules of his empiricist
belief.  Peter has tremendous love and respect for him all the same.



The Little Wooden Fool
Was a peace offering from the man who ruined Peter's life.  He was a cruel, petty
Captain uner whom Peter Served.  His cruel ways led to a mutany.  His life was spared and
the mutany was bloodless due to Peter's intervention, but mutany is mutany, and there
was no other option, even for honerable men, than to take up the life of piracy.



Careem, a Maldive prince who became Peter's closest friend and spiritual twin.



Most of these illustrations are from the--well--epic adventure called, "the Commodore's Journey"  If you can imagine a ballad going on for about a hundred pages and is still unfinished that's how long it is.   As for the look of the illustrations, I was hoping that they would have a sort of woodcut look to them--at least that was what I was going for.  The idea being that this story takes place sometime between 1750 to about the time of the American Revolution so a woodcut seemed appropriate.  If I could make them look more like scrimshaw, I would--that would be far more appropriate.





The Tower Black
This is deep down in the caves below the iceshelves of the antarctic.  It is the setting
for the climax of the Commodore's Journey







Sammy Kirkendol, a ghost, and former member of Peter's crew.  In this picture he is doing his best to help
Peter in his promise to find a certain spirit in Cold Black Bay in the antarctic.  Sammy warns him
of Edmund Black and his many traps.



The Ghost in the Cloud Chapter 22 & 23

I didn't post during the month of June.  I try to get a least a couple of posts in every month, but I've been distracted by a number of personal issues. I actually recorded these two chapters quite a while back and never got around to putting it all together. 

The Ghost in the Cloud series is, as I've said before, a kind of graphic novel/comic book only without the pictures. Chapter 22 focuses on Angelina's Mother, who has thus far remained a background person.  Chapter 23 picks up with Angelina's deal with Baba Yaga.  She has agreed to give Baba Yaga ten minutes of her time and is about to find out just what that means.

Sketches



This was done by a pencil
with a peace sign on it!

 



 I have a number of ideas for my blog, but they are all taking more time to get together than I seem to have at this point in my life.  So, in this blog, I thought I’d try to get away from music, videos , poetry, educational reflections and writing and do some old fashioned art work.  I’m not nearly the artist my daughter is or that my friend Melanie is, for that matter, but I thought I’d get back into my art work for a while. 

I’m working a bit more with shading and highlights.  I think, soon, I want to work more on eyes.   A good eye is hard to get and to line two of them up in correct proportions and have both eyes fixed on a specific point is tough for me.  Then I also need to get the highlights right on the glossy surface, and then there are those little shadows made by the lids that have to be done right for the sake of dimension and/or depth.

It reads:
"the pencil is mightier than the sword."

I like fingers—though I still have far to go to get them right.  I like them because they are crooked.  I like the look of the hands of really old people.  Their hands have stories to them through years of things those hands have done

I’m in a draw phase. I don’t know why I go in cycles like this.  Sometimes I will spend my time reading, which I like to do, but then I get away from reading and write.  Then I can’t write so I make music, and then I can’t do music so I draw and so forth.  I end up being a jack of all creative trades but master of none. 



A lot of things I create I end up posting on this blog.  I do so because I am human, and it is in our human nature to share what we do.  Even though I post my stuff here, I know that not too many people see it—perhaps only about fifty or so people, even though  I average between two to three hundred “views” a month, but really, I suspect that actual views are mostly from friends and relatives.  Sometimes there are more views, sometimes less.  I know this from the stats page and from hits on my YouTube videos which are embedded here.



It's a really cool pencil.



  It doesn’t matter to me that not too many people see what I make--I left the fantasy of achieving money and fame from creative endeavors long ago. It is some other motivation that keeps me going—a kind of a compulsion—I have to be creative.  Creativity is one of the few things that help me to stay sane.  So I keep this blog as my scrapbook.  I measure my growth, here; and sometimes even my lack of growth.  Nothing I do is quite perfect, my flaws are obvious.  One of the worst drawings I’ve ever posted here is of Molly Malone.  One of my best is of the Hood Hood, I think, from the illustrations I did for the story of “Solomon and the Hood Hood.”  I like the illustrations I did of the Arabs for Mimi’s “Hassan” concept for our ESL work out at the base.  Someone has been making use of them, and that posting, I suspect, is being used by someone to learn about the parts of clothing that the Arabs wear, and that thought makes me happy.

A Student in the Shadows

There, right between noun-verb agreement, prepositions and interjections and other grammar elements lies a little essay, a reflective essay, that would have been seen by no one had I not insisted that I check all the essays in e2020 before students can continue taking topic tests and moving on to new content.  

She, the one who writes it, is thin—too thin; and she is quiet—too quiet.  Her dark hair hangs over her unadorned face and she has a kind invisibility to her that I have known and seen before.  It is a kind of screaming invisibility.  She is shrouded in black mist and shadow somehow.  Her brother is in the adjacent room.  He too, is quiet and has the same invisibility and black mist around him. She mentions him early on in the essay, but here is the part that is haunting me:

He was a 51-year-old man living in his parent's basement with his sister and her two kids. Which was already pretty crowded and just plain wrong. But somehow, my mom thought it would be a good idea. Just a few days after living with him, we saw his true side. A drunk jerk that no one wants to be around, not even his own family. Every night he'd have at least a bottle of vodka mixed with OJ. He was not a happy drunk either. When he'd drink he'd get pissed off about everything! And no one would ever say or do anything about it so he was use to pushing everyone around. Which made our relationship all the worst. I could not take someone yelling at me calling me a "Bit**" for no apparent reason…

I have seen essays about worse situations that this, but today, I cannot help but stop and reflect on this one.  I sense it only scratches the surface of the pain.  I have the impression that her childhood has been a hell that is hard to imagine.  I look around the lab and see all the students silently working away and wonder how many of them live in similar desperation and pain.  A school like this one, I think, must be a relief to them.  They plug their headphones in to the computer, face the screen and work away.  No teacher stands yapping at them all day long, no parents to shout abusive things at them.  If they need help they sign-up for a teacher and one of us comes around.  They can see as much or as little of us as they like or need.  It is peaceful for them, really.  Sitting, tuning out the world like that is a kind of luxurious isolation—and being isolated like that  in a computer lab, safe at school, is better than being in an over-crowed home with an abusive drunk demeaning you all the time.

She was gone today.  I was just randomly checking to see who needed to take topic tests when I ran across the essay.  The auto-grading scan gave it a “0” without explanation.  The essay needs proof reading and it is written in one long stream of consciousness paragraph; but it was very articulate about the depth of her feeling—something a computer can’t begin to see or understand.  I very much need to talk to her about it.  I need to get a better sense of her need or if there is more that verbal abuse.  I need to see and talk to the school social worker who is not here this after noon—just so she knows and is aware of the needs of this student.

Early Tulips

Everyone I know is a bit freaked out by the weather we've been having. First it was a really mild Winter, and now it is followed by an extremely warm Spring (I capitalize the seasons). In fact, last week it was a lot like Summer. We're all using words we've been hearing forever to describe it, like "climate change" and "global warming" and wondering if we humans have really messed it all up. A lot of my conservative friends are in denial about global warming. They think it's all a liberal conspiracy or something. I’m not sure what liberals are supposed to gain by looking at the evidence and becoming concerned about it. I suspect that industry and the large energy corporations that stand to lose big profits if they have to endure the regulations to restrict the greenhouse gasses they pump into the air has something to do with it. So anyone who believes that there is global warming must be branded a liberal and is probably going to hell.

Hell, I think, must look something like the tar sands development of Alberta. National Geographic referred to this part of Alberta as “the Dark Satanic Mills” A lot of people don’t realize it is a reference to William Blake. I think it was in the poem called “the Chimney Sweep” and was his attempt at describing the polluted skies of England during the Industrial Revolution

But I’m a long way from tulips. Well, global warming or not, I am witnessing yet another fantastic Spring that is nearly a month early. I was very lucky to be off on a sunny Sunday morning. So I took Sammy (my dog, as you may well know if you follow my blog) and we went downtown and took a few pictures of the tulips. In about a month tens of thousands of tourists will descend on Holland, Michigan for Tulip Time and I doubt they will get to see a single tulip! Hey, but I do! I live here! And I get to see them without fighting the crowds!

The Ghost in the Cloud Chapter 21: Ifrits

I had a great deal of fun with this chapter of Ghost in the Cloud. Angelina’s sojourn is an adventure through myth, folk tales, fairy tales, legends, and religious beliefs. My advice to anyone who listens is to believe nothing you hear, and yet believe everything. Fairy tales are real, as far as I’m concerned. They are lies too. I am not even trying to be accurate about the stories—when I retell them I change them, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. What I’m really trying to do is work something out. The whole thing is a search, an exercise in finding patterns in all the myths and stories—an idea that all these things—all these stories, beliefs, and myths stem from “collective dreaming.” I get the idea—kind of, sort of—from Karl Jung. Dreams flow from our subconscious. Myths, folk tales, fairy tales are like dreams that flow from our collective subconscious (Freud and Jung may have actually said “collective unconscious” but I prefer saying “collective subconscious” “sub” implying things just under the surface of consciousness—things that hide from our conscious state, but a with little teasing, and training we can tap into insightful things about ourselves by bobbing down and pulling things up and out of that subconscious)

The trick to enlightenment is to understand that reality is in the human mind. Sure we have science. We have empiricism. We have these relatively novel ideas that the universe is composed of concrete laws and forces that form reality. We have people who believe there is an objective reality out there. But the truth is that this reality—the physical part of reality I mean— is registered by the senses, but interpreted in faulty human brains. We place a lot of faith in our perception through the senses. But perceptions can be tricked. No two people perceive things exactly the same. The horrible and wonderful thing about is that we need each other to find the elusive Truth.

The problem of Truth is that it doesn’t sit in a temple waiting for Indiana Jones to come and find it. Truth is on the move. It doesn’t stay put. Truth is a magical white stag. It appears then vanishes and we have to track it. It seems to be leading us to something—perhaps to Avalon, perhaps to Shangri-La, perhaps to heaven or Eden, perhaps to Nirvana. Christians say that Truth is a person. “I am the Truth”. But somehow it never registers with very many of them that that means that truth is not a fundamental principal. They keep going back to the patristic writers, the bible, the law, the canon, back to rules and writings as if truth was a quantifiable hammer to bang over the heads of other people asking them to conform to a right way to live. I see no truth in these acts of brutality to people. It is social control, not truth, because if Truth is a person, it is mysterious—knowable but unknowable. It is a relationship. Persons are not static. Persons grow, change, and surprise us.

But I am rambling. The Baba Yaga stories are a lot of fun. In some stories, she is more of a wild woman, but in most stories she has a taste for children—eating them that is, so as a witch she is sociopathic and not a nice. A witch in many Native American cultures is a person who has lost their center and their imbalances tend to create imbalances in others—they end up living lives that go all wrong and dark. They become crazy and sociopathic. In Islam, a witch is also sociopathic. A witch is someone who makes deals with dark jinn and, in time, they are corrupted by the jinn. They may become possessed by the jinn. The Baba Yaga stories are told and loved all over Europe, mostly Eastern Europe and Slavonic countries. I ran across a really good blog on Baba Yaga if you would like to read further: ttp://babayagawassilissa.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.htmlhttp://babayagawassilissa.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html

Elizabeth's Fish Boxes

This week I want to show you something my daughter, Elizabeth, came up with for Valentine’s Day. I think these are amazing, but then, I’m her papa. You’ll have to judge for yourselves. Just as there is a family resemblance, it would seem there might also be artistic resemblances in families. She admits to being inspired by the St. Nicholas Boxes that I made while she was growing up.

She has gone into much more detail and has made use of some pretty fancy computer programs to refine her work. She designed them, did the art work, experimented a bit and then had the materials printed up. She says the boxes take about 15 minutes to assemble and then fill with her treats. These boxes she then gave away to her friends and is saving the ones she made for our family when we next see her.

You can see that she used the fish theme and the Valentine’s Day charm and wit she has printed on the boxes reflect the aspects of a Valentine’s Day card. I really like what she did with the fish on the lid. She had them printed on plastic and had to cut each one of them out and glue them down.

Anyway, I am enchanted by her ability, very proud of her creativity, and I thought I’d share these with you.

Okey Takes a Bride

Happy Valentine's Day!

Reflections on e2020 essay writing

Because I was speaking off-the-cuff in the video, there are a few things I should explain about the high school where I work. While it is a kind of a cyber school, it would be better to call it more of a hybrid between a high school and a cyber school. I like this combination and I feel it has very real possibilities for the future of education. Certainly it is very effective for our students, traditionally called alternative education students. Our school is based on E2020 which is an online program that offers a great many classes for high school students. Up until now it has been used by traditional high schools as a credit recovery program for students who fall behind, or has been run as a program for a handful of students in a room or wing of a traditional high school for various needs.

Our program is the first, perhaps only, program to build an entire high school around e2020 course work. The result has been something very unique. Imagine a school where there are no text books, no paper, no photocopying, and no classrooms. Imagine never having to pace herds of students to a chronological curriculum that must be followed in lock-step order. Imagine students working at their own pace at whatever subject they want, when they want to. Imagine going to a school where students never have to run from biology class to English class on a set daily schedule! Imagine a school where every student gets individual attention.

As a student, I was bad at math—especially algebra. I quickly fell behind my classmates and could never catch up. I failed algebra because I simply couldn’t go at the same speed as my fellow students. But what If I could have gone at my own pace? What if, when I struggled with something, a teacher could come and talk to me, see my specific need, and sit down a while and just work with me on one concept till I understood it. What if that teacher wasn’t in the middle of a class and not ‘sacrificing the needs of the many’ because he wasn’t exactly in a classroom following the tyranny of a chronological curriculum for that day? I think I might have had success.

That imaginary school is my school. To be fair, e2020 isn’t perfect. It is still a struggle to get our students to really do all of the work they are supposed to do, and clever students can find innumerable ways to subvert the program. But we have tweaked things over the last few years to improve the quality of the program, and done our best to ensure that the students learn. And that is the most important thing to note about this program: it is well-staffed with people who care about quality and about the students we take in. We do our best to make sure that e2020 works for our needs, not the needs of e2020.

Here’s how it works: we have five labs that are overseen by lab assistants who keep watch over the students to help keep them on task and assist them with some of the problems the students may face. We also have four certified teachers in the area of Math, Science, Social Studies and English. We have between 180 to 200 students enrolled with about 125 students on a daily basis. We have a fantastic principal who is a team builder; a site supervisor, an academic counselor, a school nurse, a social worker and a special education worker.

Students sit at their computers and work on the course work of their choosing and are on task most of the time (a fact that actually surprised me. I had expected them to be constantly distracted by gizmos on the computers). If a student needs to see a teacher, they sign up for one at the lab instructor’s desk. We have a Reserve-a-Teacher Google doc at all the teacher stations and at each lab. Teachers check this all day long and go from lab to lab helping students when they need it. In the video, I have covered part of what I do. Essays are unique to the English courses. I am the only teacher in the school who actually does some grading. The e2020 program does all the rest based on multiple choice quizzes and test questions.

We have several in-school activities that help the students to get away from their computers for a while. Some of these are run by community groups and volunteers. A sewing class, choir, and several support and talk groups work with our students and there are a few other activities they may be involved in. A PE teacher comes over from the high school in the afternoons for those students who need a PE credit, Tom Parker, our Social Studies teacher likes to show a content related movie on Fridays. The point here is that we try to get the students to take breaks from the tedium of on-line work, refresh their brains and have some participation in school life.

Finally I want underscore the importance of the need to make a human connection between staff and student. Years ago, when I imagined a cyber school, I was very fearful of losing the need for a student-teacher relationship. I was fearful that the human and social connections I had in a traditional classroom would be lost as students worked in some kind of cyberspace virtual reality. I can see now that that isn’t the direction this will take. At our school, the teacher-student relationship is much better than ever. (Keep in mind I am talking from my perspective of alternative education.) I no longer have to manage a classroom, trying to protect the students who want to learn from the students who cause trouble. I don’t have thirty students in a classroom whose individual needs are impossible to met. I meet one on one with a student who needs me. I see their face. I see their need. I don’t have to worry about rushing. I can spend twenty minutes going over their essay, if I need to. This happens because essays come when they come. I don’t get scores of them thrown on my desk on a due date. I may grade between six to ten essays a day. I enjoy sitting next to the student and helping them, sometimes just talking to them about things that have happened to them. The essays make me consider their world; I take and interest in them and they respond to that. And generally the essays get a little longer, and a little better as they go—even from students who hated writing them when we first sat down to work on one.

The Ghost in the Cloud: Chapters 19 & 20

It takes a while to make these audio chapters. I write them largely as a way to constantly work on my writing. Sometimes the writing is good, sometimes it could use a little more work, but if I felt that everything I wrote had to be perfect, I'd never get to it, and certainly I'd never publish it.

What makes good writing? A lot of things really. A couple of things that I think are important are: showing the reader rather than telling the reader, for one, and being honest in the writing is another. When it comes to showing, you have to appeal to the five senses, but showing is not limited to just the five physical senses, showing involves thoughts and emotions as well--what is going on in a person's head. frankly, I like omniscience as a writer. I especially like unlimited omniscience. I like to get into the heads of a lot of characters. In doing so, I bring the reader into their world--which is really into my head and my world expressed through the kaleidoscope of multiple people--my characters. I may base a character on someone I know, but I can only project what I think they are thinking--what I think is motivating them--I cannot really know what is in their head or how they really experience the world. Other people are mysteries, really--and should be--we can know them, yet we never really know them at the same time.

That brings me to honesty. I'm not going to tell you all my secrets. I'm going to distort the truth in my stories, and yet I'm going to be honest in my lies. In creating fictional characters I have to draw on things that are in me. That said, I have to say that there are times when I write where I may not know what it is like for someone to go through events in my sotry that I've not been through--I have to imagine what it must be like and I may not be accurate about it, but I base it on what I think I would feel. There are other times when I am familiar with what my characters are going through, because I've been through them and so I may well connect the reader with something that is in my head, giving them a slice of what it might be like.

Chapter 20 you might find a bit disturbing and the ending is not bright, but more of the story is coming. I have been surprised at how many people have been listening to this audio series. I didn't really expect anyone to listen to it, let alone sustain listening to such a meandering, crazy, graphic novel in audio form. Chapter 10 has been especially popular for some reason. I've wondered of someone has put a link on it to another site. No matter, it is a joy to me that there are people, all over the world, who have listend to my meandering tale--especially chapter 10 which is one that I am happy with.

A Snowy Day

I don't really care much for winter as a season. The bitter cold and the dark kind of get to me. But there is something very satisfying about heavy snow that seems to never stop; snow that settles in deep blankest on everything, making lace on the trees; snow that sparkels in the street lights and crunches under my feet. Once you get used to driving in it, it can even be fun to drive in. I can turn a corner at almost a right angle. I feel so warm, inside and very relaxed. I watch it drift down and I allow its hypnotic effects charm me into a state of peace. I thought I'd take you, where ever you are in the world--Abu Dhabi, Ireland, Canada, England, India, Boston, Indianapolis, Bloomington, Washington DC, China, Mexico--as long as you can see this blog, I'm taking you with me on a walk with me through the snow, just for fun.

Faces of Elizabeth