Work In Progress
My Goals, Care of Joe’s Goals
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Apr
26
The weather here has been absolutely beautiful; records high temperatures, and though it has threatened rain, there really hasn’t been much more than a minute or two of light drizzle. It’s still April, and I know I’m taking a chance, but I went yesterday and bought all the plants I wanted, both for the beds and the container gardens.
The kids love marigolds, so we got two packs of those, along with some wave petunias. The “centerpiece” of each of their containers is a vegetable plant: Ari has a grape tomato plant, and Donovan has a red bell pepper. I got my own container garden going this year, with chives, rosemary, sage, cilantro and oregano. Oh, and thyme. Mustn’t forget thyme. The rosemary and chives are in their own pots because they’re perennials, and when we move, I intend to put them in the ground. We got a bunch of other plants, mostly perennials, to round out the garden. Matt’s out now buying the mulch because the bags are really too big for me to lift.
We planted the container gardens yesterday, and we just finished doing the two beds. I hurt now, and I’m going to hurt even more tonight and tomorrow, but that’s all good. I’m going to be able to enjoy the garden for the rest of the year (and it should help with the value of the house).
(And wouldn’t you know it, it’s starting to rain, so maybe I didn’t have to water everything after all. 
)
Now, I bet you’re wondering why I wrote all this and what it has to do with writing.
Feb
10
Look Out for the Wild Shoes!
Filed Under Art of Writing, Idea Factory | Leave a Comment
We live in a truly vast world. There’s so much going on around is, sometimes it’s hard to take it all in. We’re bombarded by all kinds of different messages, all of them competing for our attention. There’s radio and television, newspapers and magazines, websites and email.
Oh, email. How do I love thee, how do I loathe thee.
I’ve been involved with the internet since… wow, at least 1990. I’m certain was using it before then, but can’t confirm it (please don’t ask why). As such, I’ve seen its growth, and am pretty comfortable with it, and computers in general. With web pages – especially ones that are more than just vanity pages – come spam, because you post email addresses so people can contact you. Some of the spam I get have extremely humorous subject lines. (As a side note, I seem to get mainly ED pill spam, while Matt gets mainly breast enhancement spam. As a woman, I should hope I don’t need ED pills, and Matt certainly does not (nor does he want to) have breasts.) However, some of the legitimate emails I get can be just as amusing.
This brings me to the subject line of this blog post. I buy a lot of stuff online, so I get emails from the places I’ve purchased from. On the weekend, I received an email with the subject line “Wild shoe savings, 50% off expires tomorrow!” The first thing that popped into my mind? “OMG. You mean there are still wild shoes in the world?” And that was the beginning of the footwear-related deluge. Enough, I think, to do a decent humorous short story about a shoe wrangler in Boot Lick, TX, and her herd of Spotted Pradas. Well, maybe not decent, but I’m sure there’s a story in there somewhere.
Feb
4
Strange Dreams, Part 2
Filed Under Stuff | Leave a Comment
I don’t remember my dreams all that often. When I do, they tend to be vivid, or strange. Last night was no exception:
I don’t know why or where we were, but we were in the parking lot at a restaurant, trying to find a parking space. Someone had parked a sixteen-wheeler so that it took up half a dozen spots. The driver sighed in frustration and said “See, that’s the problem with dead people. They don’t care if they’re double parked.”
So what do you all think? Something that can be used in a story?
Jan
15
If you’re like me, sometimes you have problems coming up with ideas for blog entries or articles. Here are a some tips to help you:
1. Subscribe to a dozen RSS feeds on various subjects you are most interested in. Scan through the feeds every morning or at night and select a few articles for thorough reading. After reading the articles, tag them using your own classification system.
Classifying articles in different categories helps locate them quickly. Use Google’s RSS reader for reading and tagging the RSS feeds. You will have access to your categorized articles from any computers connected to the Internet.
2. Subscribe to a few print magazines and read them regularly. (I subscribe to Smithsonian, Saveur, This Old House and several others.) If you can’t afford to, or simply don’t want to, go to your local public library. After you finish reading an article, record the main points of the article in a Google note. You will have access to these notes anywhere in the World.
3. Use a PDA and carry it with you wherever you go. Better yet, get a PDA with a camera and cell phone. You will only carry one gadget for all your communication, organization, and content generation needs.
Take pictures of interesting places, events, and moments you come across in your daily life. Use the voice recorder of the PDA to record whenever an idea hits you. Every night, transfer the ideas from your PDA to Google notes and upload your pictures to flickr.
4. Scan through the comments posted by others on the online articles you read regularly. Record interesting ideas, pros and cons of an issue, and strong opinions posted by others in your Google notes. Leverage the wisdom of the crowd.
5. Have lunch with friends at least once a week. Bounce ideas off them on any topic. Mix ideas from divergent topics to create new ideas in you own subjects.
6. Use the time like driving, watching TV while exercising in a treadmill, etc. to think about your favorite topics and try to relate to things you observe on the road and on the TV. When you get an idea, record it in your PDA.
7. Go through all the ideas and articles you have recorded in Google notes and your RSS reader to create new ideas by giving new twists to the old ideas. Combine two or more ideas and change or improve an existing idea to come up with your own idea.
8. Use a variety of online tools like Technorati, Digg, Delicious, etc. for writing inspiration. Every hour, hundreds of new articles and news stories are posted in these sites. Check Yahoo’s buzz log to find out what people are talking about and searching for. Quickly scan them to hit a few gold nuggets that can serve as springboards for new ideas.
9. Using on-line tools discussed earlier, select an issue and jot down all the pros and cons. Search Google to enhance the idea by adding more pros and cons. Once you have collected a dozen diverse opinions, you will be able to write an article based on those facts in a pro-con format.
10. If you are good at using data for analysis and comfortable in the use of a spreadsheet, draw charts in the spreadsheet and look for patterns in the data. Provide you own interpretation to the data. Illustrate your articles with charts and graphs.
11. To generate topics for your article, use overture keyword selector. Select a single keyword and run it through the overture. You will see a dozen or more keywords based on the search popularity. Copy a few selected keywords to a notepad. Now, take each keyword and do a search in online sites like Digg, Technorati, etc. You will see a number of articles. Read them to generate ideas.
12. Ask yourself what if, what else, and why not questions on an issue and search the Internet to find answers from different sources. Create new ideas generated from existing materials, provide step-by-step guide for somebody to practice an obvious idea, or offer benefits of practicing an old idea.
Dec
22
Two Wolves
Filed Under Art of Writing | Leave a Comment
One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside all people. He said, “My son, the battle is between two ‘wolves’ inside us all.
“One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.
“The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: Which wolf wins?”
The old Cherokee replied simply, “The one you feed.”
My dad emailed me this story, and I thought it was perfect. I don’t care if it’s real or completely fictitious. The point is the message it gives. It’s all about the choices we make. We can choose to give in to anger and guilt, or we can practice kindness and generosity.
It’s the same thing with writing. We can give in to self-doubt and the fear of rejection, or we can battle through it, with hope and faith in ourselves and our abilities.