Ok, maybe that’s not exactly what SJP said in “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”, but if you know what I’m talking about then you know that it’s more about how she said it and that what she was saying was: dude, that dance move is so played.

So I’m talking about cliches.  God do I have reader fatigue.  And it’s not fair because I love to read.  Now I understand that “we’re in the middle of a like totally wasted decade; all the great themes have been used up, turned into theme parks…”  Actually, that was last decade, wasn’t it?

Anyway, make it new!

Do not, under any circumstances, think that it’s ok to take a played plot from one genre and plunk it down into another with barely anything changed.  It’s just not.

On a related topic–related to what I spent 3 hours reading today before just plain giving up–

Food fights and throwing each other into creeks is not conflict.

Middles full of fluffy scenes like that are so not what I want to read, and when the blurb promises that the book is going to be about something, it’s just all the more annoying.  Marshmallow filling in the middle is for Twinkies, not for novels.

But then, maybe some people are into that.  I don’t know.  Or maybe, like me, they just keep reading anything in search of something good, and just anything keeps getting published with the knowledge that people like us just keep reading.

/rant.

When last I was here I talked about getting into the habit of using index cards– for quick notes, for organizing thoughts, and eventually for getting visual feel for a story.  Since I’ve got a lot of stuff in my head right now, I set a goal for 10 cards a day.

10 cards has been a good amount for me.  Not so many that I’m scribbling for hours, but enough so I feel like I’ve done something.  I now have 30 cards since Saturday.  A handful of them are from a different story that intrigues me, so it’s cool to be able to make some notes on that without jumping right into “sexy new book”.

Some of my cards are for scenes I can see and have a number of points jotted down.  Some are much more vague: need scene where X happens.  Some are plant cards that will probably be merged with another scene card later: need to plant idea Y that pays off later when…

I just started reading Characters, Emotion, and Viewpoint by Nancy Kress, so I will probably have some cards on character notes coming along this week.  I have a lot of character stuff written here and there and I don’t plan to copy that stuff to cards.  But I expect to have ideas about several characters in my world and it will be good to jot down notes someplace besides gmail to Kettle.

I’m really enjoying the craft books this year.  I just finished Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell (part of the same Write Great Fiction series).  Kettle bought that one for me for Christmas (I sent her GMC which I also ended up buying for myself), having heard good things about a few books in the series.  To me it was good enough and different enough from other craft books I’ve read or glanced through that I’m intrigued enough to continue in the series.  I should start a page of some reviews of these…

Anyway, a last quick note on the subjects of cards and P&S: At the end of the book, Bell likened building writing skills to building chess skills.  He suggested an exercise in which you read through a book for the pleasure of reading it.  Then you pick it apart, taking copious, scene-by-scene notes on index cards, noting down things that worked for you and didn’t, etc.  You’ll learn by doing the exercise, have the cards for later review, lay out the scene cards to see the structure of the novels, etc.  His exercise has 10 steps which I’m not going to wholesale copy for you (because that’s not nice) but that’s the gist of it.  He suggests doing this for 6 books over a 12-week period.  Time-consuming yes, but learning often is, and I’m intrigued.  I will try it for at least one and see how it goes.

I haven’t been very into the idea of using index cards in the past for a few reasons.

• Up until very recently, I had a small, grabby child in my house all the time.
• I don’t like using up actual goods when I’ve usually got the computer up and running with me throughout the day and could just type stuff in.
• And seeing as how I so often just make notebook files on the computer, I couldn’t see writing out by hand stuff I had already typed out, just to deal it out on a table and have it grabbed by child and stomped by kitten.

But lately I’ve been thinking about it differently.  My current story world has a LOT of different people coming and going.  And they tend to come and go the most when I’m not by my handy-dandy electronic notebook.  So I’ve been having some new thoughts about jotting down scenes and other story thoughts on index cards…

• Cards are cheap—a pack of 100 is about 50¢.  So I can spare some to throw at DD .
• Cards are recyclable.  I’m more than willing to go through some paper and muslin when I make patterns, I should be as willing to recycle goods in this endeavor.
  
• Also because they’re cheap I can easily recycle them or put them in a discard file when I make changes.
• Cards are small.  I can stick a pack in my purse easily.  I think I might sew myself a WIP Wallet to hold a pack of cards.  I can start writing out scene ideas and bits of wisdom when I’m out or when they come to me.
• I can keep cards and pens in many places, like by my bed, in my purse, in the glove box, in the end table drawer, in the bathroom.   But have only one place to keep cards in use and filed cards so my ideas aren’t littering the house and car.
• Cards don’t have to be in order or stay together—unlike a spiral memo book, I can move things around and take out what I don’t presently need.
• More than just the WIP—I can write down any thought I have on the series and file it away when I get home.  I want to get a large file box (though I’ll probably start with a shoebox) with dividers for my WIPs.  (examples of file boxes: http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/555704/Snap-N-Store-Index-Card-File/ and http://www.successimage.com/item–03512X-3-x-5-Card-File-12-Deep-Hedberg-Series–03512X)
• Progress at a glance—whenever I want to see what I have for a story so far, I can pull all the cards for it and deal them out to take a look at the big picture.  This should help me see what points I need to set my brain to think on.
• Spreading out the work—rather than saving up all the typing until I get ready to work on that story, I can also try entering my cards into a Haven file for TBW (Text Block Writer and Screenshot) if I want to play with manipulating things in there.  Then I can also formulate outlines for myself if I want to look at it that way or send my progress to you.  I can set a goal to file cards from my purse once a week and enter them into the computer before I file them.  A nice way of revisiting the new thoughts I’ve had during the week.
• Saving lots of ideas may make them less precious.  If I get into a habit of writing down ideas and keeping them, maybe I’ll be more able to throw out stuff that doesn’t quite fit in.  And, if I have a file of ideas that didn’t fit, maybe I’ll be able to refresh my memory on them later and work them into something else.
• I can try playing games with myself like seeing how many ideas I can come up with, or randomly putting ideas together and looking for connections.
• I can also use them for goals.  I’m not always ready to sit down and write words, but I could­ set daily goals for scribbling down a certain number of cards which could be about scenes, character work, etc.

So I have a lot of scenes already in my head for the various stories I’m thinking about and the one I’m working on.  As I get back into the writing thing and get some of those out, I think I’ll set a daily goal of about 10 cards per day.

No, Glen, not a hot waitress, not a flight attendent.

Today I’ve been thinking about choices characters make.

I’m currently planning through a story I refer to as TC.  On another day I’ll probably tell you some of the recent breakthroughs I’ve had on it.  I’ve got characters, I’ve got a loosely outlined plot, I’ve got the major scenes and why they happen.  Yesterday I did some work on making sure the ending was a follow-through from the beginning, rather than just something I threw on, you know, at the end.  That was more an exercise in working through the story as a whole.

This morning I started thinking about the ending itself.  I had in mind a fight between the hero and an old foe from his past.  And the old foe brings some friends along which up the stakes and makes the threat larger than just to the hero and heroine.

In my head it’s always been: Naturally, this, that, and the other thing happens.  The hero and heroine work together to save the day, get over their interpersonal issues, and live happily ever after.

No, wait.

Naturally?

Is that what I want to read?  What naturally happens?  If I already know what’s going to happen because it’s the natural and expected conclusion to what I set up–what’s the point of reading it?

So today I’m working on choices.  Choices that are difficult to make.  Choices that involve sacrifice and risk.  Choices that are effectively motivated by who the characters are and what they’ve done so far in the story.

It sounds obvious when you say it–ever notice that lots of things do?

Kettle and I tend to do a lot of choose your own adventure.  Meaning we get to a point where we have different options, different ways we could write a scene or different paths characters could take and we tend to give multiple choice options to each other: what do you think should happen next?

It occurs to me that we should make an effort more often to have the character ponder these decisions.  That we should work on making these choices more important, more difficult.

And that we should also continue making the effort to think of what _could_ happen next and find something interesting, rather than thinking in terms of what makes the most sense.  Because sometimes what makes the most sense also made the most sense in the last six books you read and is not the most interesting thing to read again.

I guess my thought for the day is that a lot of writing seems very straightforward and innate, but crafting a good story is…um…another story.

I LOVE my library’s online audiobook program.  I just wish they had MORE.  For the most part, everything you want to read is wait-listed.  Today I found myself without a book to listen to while I worked on my sewing stuff, and so I browse the available titles in Romance.

Of course, when the website says Romance, they really mean Women’s Fiction, and so there’s always the possibility that I will unwittingly stumble upon the dreaded Chick Lit which…just don’t get me started.  If you love it, great for you.  It’s not what I enjoy reading and I’d like to a clear indication up-front if something’s going to be romance or some meandering heroine’s journey with a romance on the side.

So anyway, to try to make myself try new authors, when I don’t have any waitlisted reads that have become available, I choose something I’ve never heard of from the available titles and do my best to read it.  My Chick-Lit sensor started blaring as I read the description, but I really needed to just choose something and get on with my work, so I stopped dithering and downloaded.  After all, maybe I’d be pleasantly surprised.

This book starts out with a prologue about a young girl having a traumatic experience.  From there, Chapter 1 says Five Years Later, and starts with the heroine on an airplane.  The heroine is obviously not the girl.  No connection with the girl or the prologue scene is obvious.  What is this story about?

Fully half an hour into the reading, I still don’t know.  I’m JUST finding out where the plane is going, and once the heroine lands and continues her journey to the spot where she’s headed (for no concrete reason) the author finally gets around to the general and not great reason why the heroine has chosen this place she’s going for R&R.  What does the heroine want?  I still don’t know.  And because I don’t know–I don’t care.  I don’t care about the several year history of the relationship she was in with the guy she wasn’t really into, and I don’t really care about her career.

What I do care about is that I can’t go through another 13 hours of listening to this, even if it’s just playing in the background while I work.  And I think that says something about my tolerance–or intolerance–for absolutely killing a beginning with backstory and not letting the reader in on even a hint of what this story is going to be about.

It’s like talking to one of those people who wants to babble on incessantly to hear themselves speak, but really has nothing to say, only you don’t realize it until it would be impolite to just walk away in mid-sentence.  And it’s also kind of like talking to one of those people who wants to play I’ve got a secret! and wants you to beg to be let in on it.

I don’t have to be grabbed by throat in the first line, but please don’t expect me to take it on faith for half an hour that at some point this really will be a story and not a backstory.

Today I’m thinking about what happens in scenes.

A few days ago I was writing a loose outline.  It’s a story I’ve been putting together that’s not near ready for actually being written, but I was just writing down the general thinks I knew happened or needed to happen in the best kind of order I could work out.

Kettle and I have been very into studying 3-Act structure in the last few months, something I’ll want to talk about some time, I’m sure, but for this story it is sufficient to say that having a sense of that structure was helping me put those things in order and to know what was needed at what points.

Sorry, this is vague.  Ok, so part of it was that my Act 1 Climax needed to be the “Gateway” into the story world.  I’m not up to explaining all that today but I’m sure you can Google for it.  I knew something I could make happen that would but my h/h together and make them work together and push them forward into the story.  But then, looking at the outline and having it labelled as a climax it was just like–wow, that meeting in which once character lays down the law for the other two–oh so Climactic!

Not.

Despite the fact that I am sometimes capable of some witty banter and rather charming sarcasm, 3 people sitting in a meeting is not the most super-interesting way to go there.  So I started thinking of ways to make it more interesting, to move the characters around.  I ended up introducing conflict into the scene by involving another character, starting a confrontation, bringing that authority figure in to break up the fight and thereby motivating her to lay down the law that affects my h/h.  Maybe not the best yet, but better.

And then the next day, Kettle’s trying to answer some questions I gave her in an attempt to help her flesh out her current Act 2.  There’s been a push and pull between her h/h.  They’re drawn to each other by internal stuff, external forces are forcing them together while other external forces make getting together impossible, and one of them in just super-conflicted inside and out.  And then there’s this love scene.  So I’m all: what makes you guys throw caution to the wind at this point and just go for it? Because that’s the kind of thing that’s important to me.

So Kettle tells me that she’s not sure what exactly happens but she thinks there’s a conversation that’s not exactly a DTR (define the relationship) talk, but important things come out that make the characters feel this and that (more detail in our actual discussion than that, of course).

So I tell her that when she precedes first love scene with these DTR talks (and it doesn’t matter to me whether or not they definitely define it, it’s still in the DTR genre for me), it always makes me think of that scene from Jerry Maguire…You know when they’re going to be friends and have their “Friends Hats” on? And Rod’s all like why are you with Dorothy?  And Jerry tells him and Rod starts snickering (and I won’t get this word for word, sorry)

Rod: That’s the reason?

Jerry: Yeah.

Rod: [snickering harder] That’s a reason!

Jerry: What?

Rod: It’s not sexy!

That’s what I think of the conversations–not sexy. So we’ll work on that.

Then last night I’m reading Dixon’s GMC (more on that later) and she starts talking about coincidences.  Not the coincidence of Kettle popping up on chat just as I wrote that to ask me if I started reading GMC yet (creepy?), but the kinds of coincidences that happen in books when two characters just happen to run into each other because the author needs them to have an exchange of information and/or–God Save Me- because the author thinks it would be cute.  Kettle lives in this fluffyverse a lot and I think comes up with these things just so I’ll have something to aim at.

Now I haven’t, in the past, seen this as a problem of lack of motivation.  My question is always: What does this have to do with the story?  Is there any way you could get the same points across and still work on the story?  Because that’s one of those things that doesn’t work for me when I’m reading, those scenes in which nothing’s going on.

Naturally, I made the Kettle connection first.  Because that’s my job.

Hello, Kettle?  This is Pot.  Yeah, you’re all black, honey.

Hey, but guess what?  It didn’t take me too long this time to work my way around to remembering how I had to mess around with that Act 1 because it’s exactly the way I think too: in terms of conversations.

Do I really want to read a story that’s a series of conversations?  Well, if it’s by Jane Austen, yeah, but I don’t have that kind of talent and I’m not working that kind of story.

Kettle and I need to be better about asking ourselves: yeah, but what happens?

That’s my realization for the day.

Feb 28 to April 28. Shall I blog every other month, do you think?

Everything’s different. My dashboard’s all funky. I have no idea what’s happened.

My sewing stuff is just nuts. I’m stressed and busy and still loving it. I’ve had to close up shop and go to custom orders only. Oohlala, the exclusivity of my dolly couture. It’s all good.

But it hasn’t been good for my writing. When the dressmaking first started to take over, I took a firm step back away from the computer. In a few places where I was expected, I checked in to say good-bye and be back later to friends and I spent about a month trying to adjust to my new workload. And I find that now, after 2 months, not only has my fiction suffered, but I’ve forgotten how to blog. Wow.

If you’ve read me before, you might remember that I feel like blogging is an important element for me as far as maintaining my own voice and just being able to let words come as easily as ideas. It helps to keep things running more in sync, I suppose, though of course they rarely truly do that. And when I found that I was sitting in front of my screen, even at my personal blog where I have been for years and where I have felt very comfortable for a very long time, I didn’t know where to start or what to say, and I found myself way too concerned about whether the subjects I had to talk about were going to be of interest to those who would read.

So often Howard Roark whispers to me that I shouldn’t care about that. And so often I forget how useful it is to say that this is mine and if you don’t like it, you’re welcomed to go elsewhere.

I’m sure I’m quite off track as far as what I was going to talk about, but losing that comfort zone I had in blogging, I had no way to get myself back into the writing. And then I decided to write Letters to Casey.

Lame as it seems to say it, I made myself an imaginary friend. Someone I’d met who was just terribly interested in hearing about my current story. Someone who wanted to hear every little thing I had to say about my work. And seeing as how she has that handicap of being imaginary, it’s somewhat easier to accept that she does not express the proper amount of interest and doesn’t bestow the wanted amount of unearned praise. Real people you just have to be annoyed an how clueless and insensitive and wrapped up in their own stuff they are.

I enjoyed writing to Casey yesterday. So much so that after I wrote her once, I wrote her again. And again. Until I had written her 6 letters totaling close to 3800 words in one day. In doing so, I worked out details that I had been avoiding or just couldn’t pin down. And last night it seemed so much easier to settle myself for the descent into madness that is sitting down to write a scene. I opened up the file in which I had written a few hundred words of a scene and left off before the middle. And after some cautious steps forward, skittering back nervously, repeat as necessary, I finally put down some words on the screen.

And before I knew it I was through. I wrote 837 words. This morning I decided they were pretty good words, and I should try again tonight.

Thanks, Casey. Talk to you soon.

It’ s been awhile.

I’m trying.  Maybe not very hard, maybe not in the most consistent way, but I am.  And the why of it is simply that my head is full of brain dolls, and more show up all the time.

A brain doll is sort of like a character.  But a character is someone whom I work, whom I form and mold and tweak.  A character fits into a story and the story fits around the character.  They are the ones who make it to the keyboard and are not generally allowed to run amock.  A brain doll works me.  Brain dolls are creatures that live in my head.  They’re made up of bits of backstory and internal conflict with a dash of physical characteristics, and they often show up in pairs.  They tend to come with very few accessories like, say, plot points, and most of them are lazy and don’t build on their own.  They just wait around for me to do it.

Some of my brain dolls, the ones that have been with me a long time, make their own spaces in the corners of my world.  They build sets and create stories, and they live lives within the borders of their regions.  Their stories tend to be soap-opera quality messes that I could never untangle enough to put to paper, even if I wanted to.  Some of them are former characters, retired with their abandoned plots to enact and embellish on their favorite scenes for, it would seem, all eternity. 

Matt and Alex still live in the WOTM region, waiting for that last 20K or so of grey area to get colored in.  They’re still characters, and thus far, they continue to wait silently for my return, should you wonder what became of them.

 But it’s the huge brain world playset of Supertown that’s out of control.  That’s the world where Mac and Colby live, though they, too, linger as characters trapped in the brain doll world.  Rand and Marissa want their story told, but not enough to give me enough hints on plot points to keep the action going.  Marissa brought in this ex-boyfriend named Joel, and next thing you know, Tina showed up with a criminal past and said she wanted to, after much angst and denial, be hooked up with Joel please.  Well ok, Tina, but what else ya got?  Give me more to work with or get in line.  One young woman showed up a month or so ago, and she felt promising.  She brought a hero, a father, a sister.  And then she turned around and informed me that no, she had 2 sisters, and they had beaus, but please excuse their complete fuzziness.  Great.  Thanks.  Take your trilogy and wait over there.  Patiently, Carolyn waits, reminding me that she’s important and she has a love interest, and please don’t forget to introduce him at some point.  But while she’s told me what she can about him, he has yet to show up and introduce himself properly.  Which might be why we refer to him as Stasis Guy.    Today, as I stare at the last line I wrote for Rand and Marissa, wondering about their motivations, I realize that someone needs to die.  Not right now, just, you know, sometime.  And the man she leaves behind waves to me from a dark corner.  I didn’t even know he was there, but he’ll be ready to play the Grieving Widower type who finds true love a second time later on down the road.  He introduces me to his Best Friend, who pulls him away from the body of his lover.  Best Friend says hey, how’s it goin’?  Just wanted to let you know that that experience will make me realize what a jerk I’ve been to my COMPLETELY FUZZY love interest here, and I’ll be having one of those Don’t Know What You’ve Got Till It’s Gone moments (yeah, coincidentally Cinderella is playing right now, neat).  Oh, how will that come about?  Well I don’t know, that’s your job, isn’t it?

Hey, I love hangin’ out in Supertown.  I love you guys.  Really.  But I’m constantly distracted by all these new arrivals.  You guys are never going to reach your character potential if I don’t get some work done.  Help me.  Help me help you.  Give me some stories to go along with these setups, or your world is never going to be anything but a some assembly required brain doll playset. 

Rand, you’ve got that anti-gravity thing going for you.  Get up there and pull down the Welcome to Supertown sign with the everchanging digital population indicator.  Bryan, get off your not coming up with my YA subplot butt and help him out, because I suspect you’ve got a bit of telekinesis going, don’t you?  The new sign is right over there.  It reads:

No Admittance Without Plot.

I know, Wow! a post from me.  Ugh.  It’s just been exotic varieties of awful this fall.  And I’m going to spare you the details of my neuroses and angst over the past few months. 

 You’re welcome.

Anyway, today Kettle gently says: I think that’s why blogging was so good for you.  But then you sort of dropped that too.

I talk to Kettle about all kinds of things, and still, though I’m not writing, we talk of many writerly things.  So it occurs to me that just because I’m not writing doesn’t mean I can’t talk about them at you.

Last night I emailed her the following:

…I think what’s holding me back right now is that I don’t have a single character on the board with whom a feel a real connection.  There are a bunch of them who are fleshed out, whose backstories I’ve come up with and whose motivations I feel I understand, but it’s sort of like reading their dossier rather than having any intimate understanding of them.  Matt, Alex, Jack, Siobhan…  I felt them.  These guys, every time I try to slip into them, it’s like wearing rented underwear or something.  Not. Right.

How to explain what we talked about this morning…  I think the general idea was that they hadn’t incubated long enough.  They were people I made up, rather than people who sort of showed up.  They have a lot of characteristics that I gave them because it was what the story needed, not because character or writer actually owned them.  I theorize that it’s because, while I like to plan, I’m not usually planning and then jumping into actual, you know, writing.  Not like I have been this year.  And although Matt and Alex were largely created in this way, for some reason it worked for me.

Much as I like to create a hero or heroine and then create the mate from that character’s rib, think through that character initially in terms of a compliment, perhaps my characters are created from something of mine.  And lately, I’m just not seeing the resemblance.  I’m not able to relate to them; understanding and empathizing can be quite different things.

So I’m not sure what I’m saying here, but I thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind if I just came by to talk about my random thoughts now and again.

Kettle’s recent post, Do Overs, made me think of something I’ve been musing about for some time.  She started the post with the following quote which I’ll just snag in it’s entirely.

From Madeleine L’Engle {Herself} : Reflections on a Writing Life, p. 19

With free will, we are able to try something new. Maybe it doesn’t work, or we make mistakes and learn from them. We try something else. That doesn’t work, either. So we try yet something elsea gain. When I study the working processes of the great artists I am awed at the hundreds and hundreds of sketches made before the painter begins to be ready to put anything on the canvas. It gives me fresh courage to know of the massive revision Dostoyevsky made of all his books–the hundreds of pages that got written and thrown out before one was kept. A performer must rehearse and rehearse and rehearse, making mistakes, discarding, trying again and again.

There’s a thing, when it comes to art, that “real” art just happens, that really talented people just whip stuff up out of their heads.  I first started to become aware of this with regard to sewing.  It seems like everyone who doesn’t sew has an great-aunt or knew some woman or some such who could just lay out a piece of fabric, take a pair of shears to it, run it through a sewing machine, and come out with something that fit perfectly.  The “she could just look at someone and make a dress that fit” story.  And when you’re at your drafting table, transferring changes from your second muslin mock-up to your paper pattern with your back hurting and ruler getting blurry, this can really make you feel like crap.  (Not what the speaker, who probably doesn’t know jack about what good fit looks like anyway, intended at all.)

There’s the artist who slaps paint on canvas and comes out with a masterpiece.  Isn’t that the one we always see on the screen?  The chef who just knows.  The composer who hears music in his head and takes dictation.  And of course, the writer who just writes.

For me, there’s no question that we value the off-the-cuff artists above those who are more technically inclined.  While a few in this category are the absolute geniuses for whom superlative perfection just flows out in pretty much everything they do, a lot of them are just ok.  A lot of them just do good work.  Certainly not better work than another artist who plans, sketches, layers, revises, and produces a work of depth and complexity that’s on a whole different level. 

And yet still it seems to me that we sit in awe of the pantser (she who flies by the seat of her pants).  I suppose it’s just part of the awe we feel regarding the mystery of the creative process.  And we forget, or perhaps we never understood, that those bursts of pure inspiration are a necessary component for all artists.  Because some wish to or are capable of riding those waves farther, because they’re able to jump from one to the next and find their way to shore, to some point on some shore, without stopping to plan a route, we think of them as true and pure artists.

Do you ever feel like the word technical has no place in art?  The term “technical writing”, the writing of manuals, documents, etc., is often considered to the be the opposite of “creative writing”.   When you’re talking to someone who is just so proud to be a pantser, do you ever feel like you need to make excuses for the way you work?  After days and weeks of creative work, of crafting the framework for a story, do you ever read something and feel like your brand of creativity just isn’t recognized?

I’m not saying that either course is better or more justified.  There are masterworks and abysmal stinkers that come from both methods.  But I absolutely feel like we as a culture don’t so much value the “1% inspiration, 99% perspiration” adage, even when the ”pure art” isn’t overwhelmingly impressive, and I wonder if I’m the only one who gets ticked off by that.

 Ps. Thanks to those of you who have stuck with me and stopped by to leave me lovely and encouraging thoughts.  I’m mostly on hiatus right now, doing some reading, some sewing, knitting, and generally recharging.  I hope to get back to keeping up with you and to get back to writing very soon.