Dropping Off

Yes, many of my blogmates are dropping off. I hesitate to email them in fear, you know? I'd rather they stay vibrant in my mind's eye.

I will officially change the name of my blog on my birthday, next Wednesday, where to my shock (and astonishment) I cross the bridge of eighty turns around the sun.

I am astonished because I lived for many years with a cigarette hanging from my mouth and a drink of rum and coke solidly in my fist. Both abandoned in humility and defeat nearly forty years ago - now that deserves an exclamation mark, what! Nick of time should be my mantra.

I hesitate to write here now and again as I feel I have nothing to talk about. There's always a lot, of course, but I am conscious of being one of those old drones who goes on about nothing at all.

I am busy (I use "busy" when busy is a full day because of One. Solitary. Task) formatting and editing the anthology which has been ongoing for four years now, my writing workshops sadly interrupted by Covid. Writing workshops, face to face, are, to me, essential elements of writing. They are stimulating, encouraging and inspiring and most of all, massively improving to the individual writing process.  

But we are ready to roll now, the formatting has taken ten days due to the different platforms my writers were on and other issues like paragraphs tossed aside, fonts all over the place, spacing random, unessential capitalization, exclamation marks spattered like mud and, well, you get the picture.

I close with this photo I took a few days ago from the front of my building, which shows the lake on the right and the ocean on the left. Yes, I live in paradise and I need to remind myself of this when I whinge and whine.

Pleasantville, St. John's, Newfoundland.

and this gave me pause and then a huge laugh.

Oh Me Nerves

So the anthology is off to a friend for formatting. A virtual friend in California whom I met through an online writers' group. Da Webz: she is amazing. VF has since become a well established author in the sci-fi genre while raising four daughters under the age of 7. And helps out fellow authors with her expertise.

I like the cover which features my office and an old fashioned lamp and a photo of my parents which seemed to fit. I wanted to show modern technology in conjunction with the old fashioned timbre of some of the stories/memoirs/poems within it. The photo is meant to be blurry with clear text. Not sure whether it works or not even though I am enamoured of it.

I've never taken on such a humungous, soul destroying, exhausting task in my life. It ripped about a year out of my life between rewrites and revisions and formatting, repaginations, four levels of editing and banging my head off my own keyboard. I would never do it again. Sympathy and compassion (except from other writers) was in short supply along with the challenge of the writers' impatience to see the book in print.

I think it will sell well locally as it truly is a type of compendium I'd see in the old days. Bits of everything.

A few of my own and Daughter's pieces are in it. One writer pulled a piece that was her best: afraid of relatives' judgements. A lovely piece, sadly never to see the light of day. Her substitute piece never made the final cut as it was so inferior.

It's done now and I can move on to my languishing 3 novels and the CBC Short Story Contest.

Freedom.

Getting Excited

We have an anthology coming out. We are in the final stages before the print/e -run. I can't believe it. My writing workshop series' harvest. The work, the work m'dears. Agony. Words become meaningless after stroking and stroking the sentences and paragraphs. Especially when in the depths of grief and despair as I have been. I never want to edit others' work again. Intense. Unless it's just one author or one book or one story. Not this enormous compendium of multiple and varied writing styles.

Many local authors including Daughter and I are featured. Many interesting memoirs and stories of times past around this gorgeous bay of ours. Some contemporary - one of Daughter's is about Brooklyn, NY. One of mine is a Cork city story.

I'm very proud of the bunch of them, so much talent previously unexplored. We're having fun planning multiple launches. We thought: background live music, samples of readings, food. We figure if all our families bought 50 each we'd have a best-seller. *Snort*. One family of one writer has ordered over 100 and will probably want more. I can't even imagine that kind of family love!

I'm into the last week of stroking here with a final pre-publishing meeting next week.

It's amazing. I'm amazed.

And thrilled beyond belief to see this baby take flight.

Small Things Noticed & Praised.

Petals of Asiago cheese.

Jars of red jewels - partridgeberry jam - on my counter. I can't put them away.

My dog, Ansa, who now sleeps in in the morning and has to be awakened. A reversal if ever there was one.

The smell of wood-smoke and a beautiful meatloaf in the oven at this very moment.

A nearly completed knitted "window worm" for another drafty window.

Playing around with the book cover possibilities for the anthology I put together with the writers in the writers' workshop (see above) - I wish to incorporate the old and the new. And now that I look at it again I think the addition of an oil-lamp alongside the laptop would be a nice touch, what do you think? The intent for the image on the cover will be fairly blurry but catchy.

Blood sugars manageable.

Another session tomorrow with my grief counsellor.

Thanks for all the comments, so heartfelt and helpful, on my last blog post.

I sure am at the stage of life where stuff is not added but rather taken away.