I spent a week and cranked out my critical paper and then had it rejected as a how-to paper rather than a critical review. My Ashland University MFA program mentor Tom Larson requested that I read two other books and focus more narrowly on my topic of family mental health memoirs. So we agreed on "Hurry Down Sunshine" by Michael Greenberg and "Surrounded by Madness" by Rachel Pruchno along with Richard Hine's "Broken Glass". My previous paper is a good start on this upcoming term's paper about lesson's learned or something like that, I will hear more. I've done some planning about that content during the break.

So then I had to focus on finishing the last of my scenes and weaving them together with a frame of narrative, something that was new to me. In the end, I turned in 90,000 words on my draft thesis and a twenty-five page critical paper that grew to 28 pages when I formatted the reference quotes in an indented paragraph when they went more than a line or two, as suggested by the AP Style Guide. I was pleased to get good feedback on the paper.

My rough draft received the commentary that yes, it was a draft and had several stories in it.

By the time I was finished cranking out as clean of a copy as I could in the time available, I was feeling a great deal of stress in my arms and back, my tendinitis flaring up. So I've taken the holiday weeks off to get more exercise. Bob and I managed to finish hiking at each of the Seminole County Wilderness areas, learning two fun new places and once swamp walking up to our ankles.

I've also worked on my gardens, getting them weeded and planting some new plants.

But I haven't forgot about my work. I've worked on outlining one of the extracts from the 90K words as a potential book and figured out where I wanted to break the 90K into two volumes, one early life, one later life. I have a print out that I will start marking up with edits.

I've also been rather laid back about getting my reading list out in the form of reviews--I found out how out of date my Goodreads list is for one, plus outlined a dozen other papers I can write, several that I've already started.

I've been pretty busy this semester. My activities had ranged from volunteerism, my usual golf schedule, reading and writing poetry, and research on my memoir and brainstorming for a collection of essays. So here it is in summary form:

Volunteerism

I finished up my work as a reader for The Firecracker Award and it helped me gain new perspective on the quality, range of style, coherence, and organization of contemporary prize winning poetry books.

I'm working as a reader at River Teeth Magazine which is teaching me some good lessons about essay writing. What I have like is well-polished essays--if sentence clarity lacks, or the focus is weak, or the essay incomplete, I find them less appealing. The writing styles have varied as has topics. It makes essay writing an interesting aspect of writing.

I continue on with work with the Pacific Northwest Writer's Association for the tenth or twelfth or something like that year in a row. One of the benefits of PNWA membership is the Author Magazine, which recently offered up an interview with Science Fiction writer, Nancy Kress, which I found very interesting and finally encouraged me to buy one of her books, although I have read some of her short stories. 

This is one of the two main craters at Volcan Masaya, see project work description below:

With my concentration on poetry and memoir, it leaves me very little time to read in my primary area of novel writing. But since this concentration builds areas of personal weakness, I find it a useful thing to do.

I continue my participation with Zooniverse, which is a site that allows volunteers to help process scientific data. Typically, volunteers view photos and click on objects inside the photo and identify them. So far this quarter, I've helped identify animals in the Serengeti, wind flow patterns on Mars, egg-laying behavior of worms, and potential supernova's. I'm up to almost 2000 identifications of various types.

My husband and I took my niece to Nicaragua this spring to help out on an Earthwatch Project Exploring a Volcano in the town of Masaya. My niece is a pre-medical undergraduate with a BS in Biology who hopes to become a doctor. We took her as a graduation present to help encourage her into exploration of the world, the needs of people, and the various ways science impacts our understanding. The project took us inside various craters at Volcan Masaya taking microgravity readings, collecting GPS data and witnessing a project to collect comparative level data (from data 20 years previous). 

and sulfur emissions to help scientists understand the impact of volcanic emissions on the surrounding community. We also climbed into a lava tube, spotted bats, and got to see three dimensional renderings of photographs taken during measurement work. I got a bad dose of the flu so I wasn't very inclined to go hopping over rocks in the darkness but I thought the work fascinating.

In line with my usual practice of learning about a country before I go, I collected and started reading some of the literary works from Nicaragua.

I still continue on as a 5th Grade Catholic Religious PREP school teacher, the classes meet every other week and teach children about the seven sacraments of the Catholic faith--Baptism, Eucharist, Penance, Confirmation, Marriage, Priesthood, Healing, while explaining the Catholic calendar (special seasons) and about what it means to be a Catholic.

Poetry Reading and Writing

So far I've completed three packets of material that I have sent in to my mentor, Ruth L. Schwartz, along with an emulation poem for each of the books of poetry we've read so far (see the poetry page, I've started putting out some of my essays about the books) and written an essay about what we can learn in terms of poetry book construction, types of poetry and styles and basic techniques. I've also read several essay books where the author also writes poetry and contrasted the work in the two books. 

Essay Writing

One of the things I mentioned in my application to Ashland University's MFA program is that I hoped to move my writing of book reviews to a higher level by writing essays about reading material I'm using to help build my list of memoir read during the program (50 memoirs suggested) and for my own purposes (50 poetry books). So I've been reading a lot, and doing the same with my nonfiction resources, taking quotes, or poems and sorting them against a proposed essay book outline. I'm hoping to produce a mixed format, poetry and prose book on completion. I find it is very tedious work to collect source material.

Memoir Writing

For my memoir, I've focused on taking the "situational" material (from Vivian Gornick's The "Situation and the Story" where I portray how a family event over the course of thirty years helps explain our family's experience with drug and alcohol addiction and its impact, and sorted these out into chapters. Within the chapters, I'm sorting my research data; basically taking quotes that I can use from source material I'm reading and placing them in context. I'm also brainstorming about how my overall concept of what was going on has changed as well as how historical events in those years affected us. This raw data helps me build the "frame" or context for the memoir. I'm hoping that I can connect some of the improvements in science, knowledge, medicine, and social organizations are affecting those who are impacted by addiction as a resource for others who may share these problems.

After I use the basic texts about different problem areas where our family came into contact with various organizations, I plan to look for recent publications, and entered into ResearchGate as a tool for finding source material.

Social Media and Participation and Submissions

I'm trying to maintain my presence on Facebook, Empire Avenue, Quora, PoetrySoup, and other social media but have slowed down. I tend to socialize online when I am very tired and not able to think about my writing projects. I've started participation on some quorums in LinkedIn, and on a new site called The Prose where a community offers challenges to writers. I've also have been working on Ancestry.com, Newspapers.com, and Archives.com to find out about my family history. 

On our way home from the Ashland Residency, my husband and I took a week to visit my sister and explore some of the East coast of the United States. I grew up on the West Coast and much of the East Coast is unfamiliar to me, so that translates as time for travel adventure. We also had the fun of running into old friends moving to the South on our trip, it was fun to have the chance to sit, discuss Boeing, old times and new times.

Even though I travel, I have learned to make use of the long empty interstate stretches and evenings to catch up on my reading for the MFA Program. Following the residency, I had a bunch of new poetry and memoir selections from guest speakers to read and a set of assigned readings for the upcoming semester. We're reading:

• The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative by Vivian Gornick
• The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew by Sue William Silverman
• The Empathy Exams Essays by Leslie Jamison
• Full Body Burden : Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats by Kristen Iversen
• Prairie Silence: A Memoir by Melanie Hoffert
• I selected Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writer's of/on Creative Nonfiction by Robert L. Root Jr. and Michael Steinberg as my optional book because I felt I wanted a better understanding of essay as opposed to memoir (we were told the percentage of narrative played a large part in the definition) as well as a look at some of the variations along the way.

I've completed a first reading of the above books except for the last. I like to reread along with the class curriculum because I find it makes me pay more careful attention and allows me to find the needed references to class discussion questions because I already have a familiarity with the book outline and don't have to rush to finish at the expense of the work.

Besides the reading and cleaning my house so that I now have my reading separated into genre piles and shelves, I have also taken on two new volunteer duties in addition to my upcoming aid to an Earthwatch.org project to help with a global warming study, one as a reader for a contest, the other as a teacher for my church catechism. 

I also have a good idea about how I am going to frame my memoir. Framing, I learned in the residency, is what they call the story line as it varies in time and perspective despite having a single narrator. Although the narration will be by me, the story alters during the twenty year time of events as I age, but also as a result of this project and as a result of lessons learned. Some of what alters when selecting a frame, is verb tense, maturity of voice, time, as well as what is driving the project.

I was given a bit of critique flak because of one scene written as a six-year-old, and one as a twenty year old without any framing. At six-years-old, I often just repeated what I had been told without understanding how it might be viewed, especially in modern times. Our family changed many things down the road of life including how my parents disciplined children, roles and responsibilities and diet.

Bonnie Rough very helpfully provided an introductory set of questions to be answered.

Before my idea about how to frame the memoir, I had developed a list of "situations" or "scenes" that I felt were important to cover in the overall story line. I've worked at drafting the situations and at writing attempts at the frames. I heard loudly what readers liked and disliked. I do stubbornly maintain my view of the style of memoir, one with a future look upon it which I have seen used in writing, and my need to have my perspective for the project grounded in research, although the style is something I am going to have to experiment with along the way. In the residency, I did my book report on Da Chen's "Colors of the Mountain" and just doing that based on my earlier reading assignments I found that I hadn't grounded the book in our family. I didn't really want to write about my family so much as the situation we were all involved in, but I can see that without doing a gossip columnist shark attack on all members of my family (I think this has to be the nightmare all writer's face when considering writing memoir), I could still introduce them in such a way that people could see the complexity of their personae and the dynamics within a family, all which had effects on the outcome of the situation.

I especially liked the rich style of essay/memory Steven Harvey used in one of his pieces we read about his mother. I am not quite certain I am up to that level of writing, but maybe. I do have a slightly different tangent because I very much want to write something helpful, useful, upbeat, even if the topic is quite sad and downbeat. I don't want a chirpy voice that says I've got rose-colored glasses.

I had already started many of my situations as essays and when I discussed it with Bonnie Rough and Kate Hopper, they both indicated that "situations" could be within short essays and reframed into our final project/memoir.

So that brings me back to the need to submit my work. I quit submitting until I was firmly into a writing program that I felt comfortable with, and now that I have done much of the spit and polish sort of requirements I should have the next two weeks for writing, editing and submitting. Wish me luck.

I feel like I'm moving in slow motion but I read another fifty pages from Packet 2 for the workshops in my MFA program residency at Ashland University, chose my book for my book presentation, and completed several more reviews. I also almost finished reading "The Situation and the Story" by Vivian Gornick. She makes several good points about organizing your memoir based on memory. I've compiled my source materials so far--memoirs, books similar to mine, and writing books and I already have 25 on the list. I've had some ideas to add to my memoir that should help the opening.  I've two ideas for the class exercise. The last thing on the list will be the book presentation. It will be the start of my comparison between 2 or 3 of the memoirs read so far. It will be good to move some of my stack to the shelf again and open up space.

Today I also joined some of the Ashland University sites. I still need to track down a problem with my email and another one with my ticket. I had all the bills paid until a day ago, and also solved some of my banking difficulties. Now just to test the printer and other supplies.

We're still playing get the yard back in order after Germany while also gathering supplies for our trip to the Amazon in Peru. We need rubber boots, protection against mosquitos and expensive rabies shots and new glasses and sunglasses.

I returned home from my trip to Germany and found that I had been accepted into Ashland University's MFA program in nonfiction--I'd applied with a draft form of my memoir, one literature essay and one section from my golf book.

Since then, we have managed to clean up the house and get the gardens somewhat under control, and start the preparations for our volunteer trip to Peru to help an Earthwatch.org project collecting data about global warming impact in the Amazon (flooding has been the most commonly observed affect) and the project wants to know how it impacts the plants and animals.

So, I needed my annual physical, my husband Bob had his already, and we both needed to get vaccinations for Rabies, Typhus, and a medicine for Malaria. We also needed sunglasses since we'll reside on a paddle boat for two weeks, with potentially up to six hours a day on the water (only three during peak hours), some of the time we'll be out at night doing counts of caiman. 

We have our travel booked to Iquitos, Peru and to Ashland, Ohio. I've started reviewing my reading materials for Session I with one of the two mentors, went through half yesterday and started work on my Bibliography of materials that I know I will need. I need to pull out some of them I gathered for my first novel, also. My submission had a varied set of voices--some memory, some advisory, some analytical, partly because I assume that I will present material in three different forms in the final book, and I also wondered about how different selections of voice in memoir were viewed by potential readers.

Atrium

The Atrium is a hidden area at the back of a building (name?) that not many know about. I asked a gentleman about how to get in since I kept getting lost because one or the other door would be locked, but he told me no one was there and asked if I were a teacher there or what. Inside the Atrium is a beautiful wood lined ball room hung with white draperies. The photograph to the left shows the path to the inner Atrium area.

Classrooms

Classrooms were large enough for a whole group with the usual sort of student tables. Or they were is small rooms suitable for a close knit workshop with a door to keep the noise out. Our workshop room looked out over a small patio. Below is the main lecture hall

Botany Bay #13 Photograph above is the Building

My room was pretty comfy, although I didn’t spend much time there. Most nights, I’d get on the internet and wait until my husband showed up while reading then crashed. Wi-Fi was delayed for a day, upsetting me a great deal because it was my primary way of letting Bob know I had arrived okay, I even ended up crying when I finally got it because I was so relieved. I did mention that at UCF, WiFi was free on the entire campus. I think this surprised the Trinity folks but they soon got us all on WiFi for free. Everyone relies so much on WiFi anymore, it seems impossible to be in an educational facility without it.

One desk with bookshelves above provided my work space. The chair was adequate.  Across the hall from my room, I had a sitting room with chairs and tables, a kitchen table with chairs, and cooking surfaces (small kitchenette) that I didn’t much use but occasionally sat in for a change of air and light.

The bathroom was utilitarian, one shower, one toilet, one sink, and two shelves. The shower had a rack for toiletries. My roommate and I were very careful at first but soon spread our junk around more freely.

Breakfast and Lunch at the Buttery

The Buttery is found down a set of stairs from the main plaza. It’s a cafeteria with a salad bar, sandwich bar, hot food bar, serves up breakfast either full or continental. I was happy with the continental featuring an Irish biscuit with raisins and the size of my fist, cranberry juice, and an apple every day that I ate (most of the time). They prepared cookie platters and coffee and tea for our breaks, too. What did I eat most often? Chicken strips and chips, also had fish and chips, diet coke and candy bars and popcorn. They had several places to eat, lots of tables and chairs, plus some wood block tables and benches, plus a line of padded chairs more suited for sitting and writing along a back wall. Plenty of room for everyone to eat together but I mostly sought a break from everyone and quiet.

We ate at the Buttery via a pass that offered us the continental breakfast but the later upgraded it to the Irish breakfast. I paid for lunch when I ate here, although the first day, before they got the

Buttery Vault set up, they okayed up to 9 Euros worth of food.

Buttery Vault

Many times our group had meals ordered up at the the Buttery Vault. They serve hot food in a more formal setting specially for our group. I had beef and potatoes once, often ate salad, had broccoli, green beans, and cauliflower on different occasions. I had chicken twice, cooked different ways.

This was free, no pass necessary but set up for our group.

Graduate Memorial Building

We got to experience a musical performance in the conference hall, it had pretty good acoustics. The band we saw performed traditional Gaelic music, including acapella Gaelic songs, dancing, fiddling,  More about that in another blog.

Front Gate

The Front Gate was often a meeting point for us students when we ventured as a group out into Dublin city for events, dinners, etc. The Front Gate and other gates can be closed for security reasons such as when Mrs. Obama visited the Book of Kells. The photo shows outside the front gate near the street.

Irish Writer’s Centre

The Irish Writer’s Centre is a beautiful building where local writer’s present their work to audiences. It’s off campus, about 1 mile away, straight down the main thoroughfare.

1592 Restaurant

Is a special, formal rooms where they set up dinners for our group and where many of the students held readings of their work.

Nassau Street Gate

The Nassau Street Gate was where we often picked up buses when we went on events outside of campus. This gate is close to where the Book of Kells is housed.


Below: On Campus looking toward the Nassaue Street Gate and Book of Kells exhibit.

I sent in and got feedback on my next 20 pages on my third assignment packet of scenes but now need to get my essays done. Part of the delay is finding adequate support from the reading, so it involves a lot of cut and paste from a lot of 300+ page books. I'm hoping to find several examples from several texts that show the principle being discussed.

In the process of doing the one essay, it grew into four essays or articles, since some tend to be just facts and data.

The four books I'm using as the main source are my semester reading assignment selected by me and Evelyn Conlon:

1. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li
2. East Wind West Wind by Pearl S. Buck
3. Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian
4. The Writer and Her Work by Janet Sternburg

I'm also using 4-8 other resources in support of these essays, so all in all it adds up to a lot of work.

I spent several days doing submissions and will hope to do some more after I've finished these essays.

Also finished reading Birds of America by Laurie Moore, she really uses dialogue to good purpose in these stories. Most have a distant portrayal of painful situations that affects the readers emotions.

My "volunteer work" or getting out and about these last weeks surrounds Zoouniverse, my work on my model, and this month I'm the coordinator for the Central Florida Golf Club. Also loved seeing Mama Mia at the Bob Carr Performing Arts Center.

I also did some place setting research for the novel and worked on the keyword specification of my blogs. I may well start a new political oriented blog. 

I'm looking forward to judging my first poetry soup contest in two weeks along with a visit from my niece.

This week I learned how to work with some of my Kindle books. Some of the Kindle books didn't have a table of contents, some didn't have indexes, some didn't have useful links at all. 

So I found that if I book mark a page, and then click on the book with the bookmark, it opens up a page similar to the list you get when you do a search, but in the list, you have sentences from the page that was bookmarked.

In my Side by Side Chinese and English Grammar by C. Frederick Farell etal, published by MacGraw-Hill, I found that I bookmarked pages where the way the Chinese language differed from English as well as some pages useful for constructing my novel I'm writing. Also, in the MacGraw-Hill Chinese Dictionary and Guide, I found I had to book mark the English-Chinese dictionary by each page of the alphabet for ease of finding things. You'd think that they would want the online version to be as useful or more useful than the paper copy. This same version could use each of the broken mark page to be findable on the search, but this doesn't occur. I would recommend that each of these have a chapter mark. Sure, that is a lot of work since the broken marks count goes up to 25 marks and the number of words up to 2000, but I would find having both there very helpful. Some of the note making I used here will show up in my essay.

I also marked notes on the story I'm using primarily in my essay, "One Thousand Years of Good Prayers" by Yiyun Li. I found that when you copy and paste from a Kindle book that the Kindle reader automatically builds the reference for you, this is wonderful help. I also worked with paper, collecting references from "The Geography of Thought" by Richard E. Nesbitt, who writes on how attention, perception, language, and correlation by people from Asian countries differ than from Western cultures. He also talks about how the mind set of bilingual and people familiar with both countries could be set by using cultural prompts. He also talks about the errors one makes given one mindset or the other. For data and process analysts the differences between the two are akin to object-oriented programming versus process-oriented programming, which I think would probably alter the results for those people with training in these areas.

The essay is about 1500 words at the moment and Evelyn Conlon, my mentor for the semester, has said that I needn't turn it in until the last packet goes in. I have two other topic areas I want to cover as a contrast and compare that will help connect my notes from memoir authors Brian Leyden who wrote "The Home Place", Ross Skelton who wrote "Eden Halt", and some others and some of the political data I have. I think I'll turn in the start of the essay anyway just so I don't get thrown out for breaking rules or something.

I worked on finalizing the golf book, the index is a much more timely task than I supposed, but the good news was for me, that I could code the marks on each chapter then merge into a single document, then create the index and test it for completeness.

This week my reading mostly consisted of rereading previously read books, but I did start "The Wandering Earth" by Cixin Liu, a classic of science fiction. 

This week I worked on writing an essay for my Carlow University MFA program about voice in contemporary Chinese literature. So, I have 500+ words of my essays in fairly good shape for the next package to go into the university. I'm working on several since I'm finding lots of content and because I won't be at home with as many of my resources for awhile. So I will use some of my notes from my residency as posts while I'm away.

Meanwhile, I've read through fifteen books on writing looking for various meanings of how voice is presented in literature. I've also looked for footnotes in One Thousand Years of Good Prayer by Yiyun Li. I've collected five other books on China related to voice, and a similar set on the emigrant experience.
I wanted a good comparison between voice in memoir and voice in fiction and so read Brian Leydon's Home Place since I remembered his readings containing tales of the experience of having family members who emigrated to the US. 

I also realized I didn't have any resources about plant life in China, ordered those books along with more Chinese fiction to read to have a fuller view about what authors are writing about China at home and in China.

Meanwhile, we've made our arrangements to go north to Canada, furthering my research about geology that will be used in the next book down the line and exploring more golf and escaping the anger of those around me that has me stressed out to the max. People don't realize how empathetic I am to the slightest signal.

Some are less slight, such as the Home Owner's Association showing up and wanting gravel previously given the okay to be stored on the side moved which leaves me having to do a lot of gardening.

Via A Broader View Volunteering program, I saw that I can work in China, but I would like to take my niece with me as a way of introducing her to travel outside the country. I'd like her to have some other opportunities where I can send her on her own, but there is so little time before she's off to college I might not get the chance to do so if I don't take her with me. I would go this year in November or December, but it seems like such a far way to travel for just two weeks of time. Bob and I are debating next years schedule of away from town and I hope maybe I will get to spend time in China then. 

I've also started putting together my packet of first scenes to send in to my mentor, finishing four scenes and revising an earlier scene to match up with the more defined outline. I've still one more scene to write and quite a few to edit. 

The edits add more scenery from China, alter names, foods, and other lifestyle issues in the book. I also had various ages for the main character and I'm altering those references so that the scenes fit together without conflict. I've also worked on expanding my villian's role into a side plot.

These scenes are still present time, I haven't decided on how much in the future I will change them to be. I've also worked on a new short story and one sonnet. I guess if it works out, I'll work on calls for submissions tomorrow and maybe the next day.

I guess if people were to ask me why I was taking an MFA program, it would be to quiet all the outrage about me writing books. I'm paying to write and learn, not to volunteer, not to play jump to my whip. I can does those without paying for an MFA degree. And no, the money would not go to someone else to write, I would use it to write and I have rights as a citizen and needs just like any other person.

So with my main assignment for my Carlow University MFA program residency complete, all I had to do is write, right? Sure thing, clear sailing, but then this little bitty niggly worry thingie kept plaguing me. Stare at the ceiling. Stare at the garden. Stare at the floor. Stare at the piles of books. What was I missing?

Eventually, I get it. I'm missing a plan. I know I have another essay due on the 7th along with 20 pages, but what pages?

Why am I uneasy? Is it because I haven't submitted anything recently? Yes, that, too, but what should I submit and where?

What if they all get accepted? Am I ready?

So I did accomplish something. I did figure out I needed to send the rewritten beginning, still in modern time rather than future. I always build from the existing because we may forgive and forget but we always have our roots. I collected data, invented a subplot, wrote 3000 words. I did pick out various stops along the main character's route and found pictures and background data about some of the cities, and some points along the plot line enhanced by history. I discovered I could go to Shandong Province in China with A Broader View Volunteers, too, which sounds fun but probably not possible until next year--this year is pretty booked up. A lot of my brainstorming comes out of longer range parts of the story where I need to backfill to the first part of the novel.

So then I had to wonder, am I ready for such a trip to China? So I bought MacGraw-Hill's Chinese Dictionary & Guide by Quanyu Huang--it focuses on teaching written Chinese via the marks and mark count. I bought the Tuttle Mini Chinese Dictionary by the Tuttle Editors because it has a word oriented way to find words and meanings. Finally I bought Side by Side Chinese and English Grammar by C. Frederick Farrell, Feng-hsi Lui, Xiaozhou Wu, and Rongrong Liao. I've wanted to check my names so that I don't inadvertently call something using a Chinese-English homonym that might embarrass me. Also the equivalent names in the languages especially sounds might create a sense of common knowledge. I also found a Pinyin Pronunciation Guide from the Centre for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language in order to understand how the different tones were sounded as marked by accents in various directions.

My reading consisted of my book that I'm reading for this month--One Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li--I'll have a review, soon. I also came up with some ideas of what to look for in writing the essay. 

I also read, Chinese Intelligence Operations by Nicholas Eftimiades since I may have a thriller plot, I don't quite know how it will affect the story yet. I already know I have one character whose purpose is hidden maybe even sinister and I know that I need my villain(s)--how political is that? Sometimes character's don't even know their purpose so they act without knowing and only understand at the very end.

I also couldn't help peeking into Laurie Moore's Birds of America: Stories which I found quite charming, more eventually on that topic.

Note: Some of what I cover in this overall blog, especially reading materials, will be covered in some of the other blog sections where I talk specifically about stories, poems, etc.

Then I built a list of item I had close to ready for submission and matched them against a potential list of calls for submission. I worked on a letter for an agent but ended up not liking it.

I took a look at my marketing plan--matching up my blogs and other online activities against those products I had created and found some holes--these will come about eventually.

I made an error in my essay when I said I needed to write 600,000 words, like many who find connections I combined word count and page number so I really meant 150,000 words and 600 pages, divided into three volumes.

Good news--I received notice that Loconeal Publishing is interested in my short story "Death and the Fishbowl Pontoon" for their Pirate Anthology, more about that in later reports.

And I think I may be near agreement on the illustrations for my golf book.