Thursday, February 21, 2008

Writing Out of My Head, again


Here's a couple more Baby Alex pictures. In the first one he kinda looks like Eminem after a hard night partying. But seriously, I can hardly wait until he's old enough for me to read Dr Seuss books to him. Maybe write a few Seussy style poems myself. By the way, those are not my legs in the picture.

Well, Bloggers, it's Thursday already, actually technically only thirty five minutes until its officially Friday. Good, I guess. I'm so tired of Thursday that my eyes are almost crossing. 'Course, that may be from all the hours writing at my computer.

I spent an inordinate part of the day (since it was crappy rainy) working on re-formating a manuscript. I've had a basic manuscript of my collected poetry done (working title, Out of My Head) for the worst part of a year...or I thought I had, but then I decided several days ago that the order of most of the poems was all wrong and rather than constantly scrolling through back and forth and cutting and pasting 120 plus different pieces here and there, I would just do a new revised order Contents page and pull the poems out of my general poetry folder on my desktop and make a new manuscript. Make that a revised manuscript. It would be much faster that way, I reasoned. Well, it was. It was working out great, my fingers were flying and I managed to format over a hundred pages when I think I clicked cut rather than paste and managed to completely delete two poems from my computer. When I opened a poem that should have been Spider On The Wall, it was Skunk. Game of Love was Musing On Feminine Endings. I still had the real Skunk and Musing poems, but the contents of the two others was gone, baby, gone... even if their file names were there. I'm still not entirely sure how that happened.

But, never fear, all was not lost. I have a back up file somewhere but the way I stash things I probably couldn't find it in this decade. While I work primarily on my desktop in Open Office (Linux Ubuntu), I do keep duplicates of all my writing stuff on my Mac Laptop in Word. I also put most of it on my jump drive, so it was easy to replace the poems. I also found a half dozen poems in my file that I completely forgot I wrote. Bonanza! With a little edits they'll fit in fine...if I'm careful what keys I hit.

I'm going to try to be more careful and quit working when I get tired. I have an unfortunate tendency when writing and editing my stuff to work for anywhere from two to six hours at a time or more. Without moving from my chair. Until the dogs bother me about one or another of their meals or demand a walk. Thank goodness for dogs.

Tonight, I stopped writing and burned the pasta.

Somebody asked recently, what jump starts you to write? Interesting question since I don't do it for the money I'm not making. I seem to have an emotional need to download all the stuff that's constantly in my head onto a screen and/or paper. I write because I can't not. Yeah, I know that's grammatically incorrect. I majored in English. Even if I'm spelling challenged.

Maybe one day my computer savy will be up to my creative output. Just gotta watch those delete keys.

Other news: We missed our dog agility class tonight due to the dratted rain. We were really looking forward to starting Ginny. The first classes are such a hoot with the dogs being totally clueless and the owners almost as much. Total chaos.

I actually did get an offer on Mother's house after only eight days on the market. Almost unheard of during these nasty economic times. It wasn't an acceptable offer as written. I countered. They have two days to counter mine or walk. Meantime, three more people want to see the house tomorrow and there's another Open House this week end. My Realtor is terrific.

Those of you who followed my all too frequent tales of woe when I was hoping to sell my own house a year ago know how passionately I wanted and needed to get an offer and move back then. It didn't happen. I was really disappointed. My life situation changed and fortunately I no longer need to move, since my house wouldn't sell then or probably not now even after doing the updates I've done that I couldn't afford to do when it was for sale. Only the most expensive and median priced homes move at all, if they move, albeit slowly. My house doesn't fit into either category and its 44 years old.

Now, when I am not all that worried whether the other house I'm marketing sells quickly or not and am not stressed about monthly bills, I get an offer on it almost right away. Life is ironic isn't it? Sometimes, as Danny says, its hard to see 'the big picture.'

Ah well, it's now officially Friday. That's Mexican food day. Ole. Live long and prosper.

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