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Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

Posted in Birds, Nature, Travels With Maggie, Writing, tagged , , , , , on February 24, 2012| 8 Comments »

More About Maine

“I felt like I’d been misplaced in the cosmos and belonged in Maine … I had to live this long, have the experiences I’ve had, to create what I do. I knew I wanted to write for years, but I had to be ready so I wouldn’t blow it. The move to Maine was the final step. ” — Terry Goodkind

Travels With Maggie

Acadia National Park -- Photo by Pat Bean

Yesterday’s blog of a simply photograph, quote and my Bean’s Pat was a throw away, the kind of blog I write when I need a break from writing.

The comments it brought, however, got me thinking more about Maine and the nine days I spent there. The trip was part of a six-month, 23-states-and-Canada, 7,000-mile journey I made in 2006. It was my first time in New England.

I dawdled along the way, so that far too many of Maine’s birds that I wanted to see had already migrated by the time I reached Bar Harbor, Maine. I saw only eight new life birds of the twenty or so I had expected to find. And a storm blew up the day I was supposed to go whale watching.

Other than those annoyances, everything else about my Maine stay was perfect.

Bar Harbor streetscape. While I missed the birds, I caught the town's off season serenity. -- Photo by Pat Bean

One of the nicest things about my stay just outside of Bar Harbor was the free shuttle bus that stopped at my campground every half hour or so, and which took me all over Mount Desert Island, including Acadia National Park while my canine traveling compainion, Maggie, stayed behind in the RV.

The park is full of natural wonders to explore. One of these was Cadillac Mountain, the highest summit on the East Coast north of Rio de Janeiro, and the first spot in the mainland states to be hit by the morning sun in the fall and winter.

I was on its summit one dawn to catch that first ray of rosy light. I laughed, but to myself, when one guy standing nearby spotted a herring gull and got all excited because he thought he had seen a bald eagle. No reason I thought to extinguish his excitement. Later in the day I did see a bald eagle soaring over the park. I hope that guy also saw it.

As replacement for the canceled whale tour, I took a trolley tour of the island. Our guide was full of facts and trivia, such as President William Howard Taft’s 27 strokes on the Kebo Valley Golf Club’s 17th hole back in 1910, and the fact that scenes for the Dark Shadows TV soap opera had occasionally been filmed on Mount Desert.

Hopefully the next time I’m in Maine – a revisit is definitely on my to-do list – I’ll arrive before the birds have migrated south.

Bean’s Pat: All Write: Spring and the Cigarettus Smokerus http://tinyurl.com/7ox9d76 As an avid bird watcher, I laughed my head off at this. But, warning, if you don’t have a sense of humor some among you may find this offensive and sexist.

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I Miss My Old Remington Manual Typewriter

Posted in Journeys, The Write Words, Writing, tagged , , , , , on February 20, 2012| 10 Comments »

Here's what my old manual Remmington looked like. Someone on e-Bay wants $299 for its memories. Mine are worth a whole lot more, but I don't need to spend $299 to recall them.

 Mark Twain, according to Wikipedia, claims that he was the first important writer to present a publisher with a typewriten manuscript. It was the 1886 manuscript for “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” Historian Darryl Rehr challenged the claim, claiming it was Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi” written in 1883, that was the first.

Once Upon A Time

I taught myself to type on an old Remington manual typewriter. I then got a job as a Western Union typist – I typed up telegraphs from people who called on the phone to send one. My biggest thrill was the day Tennessee Ernie Ford was on the other end of the line.

A familar happening when I typed on my old manual Remington

My typing speed went from 45 words a minute to 120 words a minute. But the job only lasted a few months before I quit to become barefoot and pregnant for what seemed like an eternity.

It was in the middle of my seven consecutive years of changing diapers that I decided I wanted to be a writer. For the next few years I banged out terrible fictional prose and dookie poetry on that old Remington. That’s how you began to be a writer.

Then I stuck into the back door of a small newspaper as a darkroom flunky, and over the next four years worked my way up to being the paper’s star reporter. I thought of myself as a cross between Lois Lane and Brenda Starr.

Eleven years later, when I was a reporter at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, I typed up my first story on a computer. I hated it – for all of two weeks.

At home, however, I was still typing away on that old Remington. But as the computers at work got better and better, I finally gave up my Remington for a home computer. I don’t question that the writing was easier and faster, but to this day, I still miss my old Remington.

Remember changing out typewriter ribbons, and making carbon copies. I suspect only those of us with more years behind us than ahead have such memories.

There was something extremely gratifying about manually slamming the carriage back at the end of each sentence. Then there was the ability to yank a piece of paper, containing nothing but meaningless dookie, out of the machine. The ritual then was to crumple it into a ball and toss the wad into a nearby waste basket.On especially bad writing days, the basket would be overflowing and the area around it a jungle of paper balls.

One simple does not get the same physical release of frustration from merely using a finger to hit the delete button.

The truth is however, that I don’t want to go back. Couldn’t even if I wanted, but it sure is nice to have memories. And that old Remington typewriter, which eventually was donated to a charity thrift store, created lots of them.

Too bad I didn’t keep it. I think I paid $7.50 for it at a garage sale in the early 1960s. I noted today that one similiar to it, if not the exact model, was listed for a $299 minimum bid on e-Bay.

Bean’s Pat: Wistfully Wandering http://tinyurl.com/836mqtu Ditto what she said. A blog for those with wanderlust in their souls. Be sure and check out her first 25 reasons, too.

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Favorite Places: Grand Teton National Park – For One

Posted in Favorite Hikes, Favorite Places, Lakes, Nature, Travels With Maggie, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 19, 2012| 13 Comments »

“Give me the comma of imperfect striving, thus to find zest in the immediate living. Ever the reaching but never the gaining, ever the climbing but never the attaining of the mountain top.” — Winston Graham

While this tiny creek is too small to make most maps, it makes it on the list of my favorite places. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Travels With Maggie

Wyoming's Grand Teton, photographed at the end of a hike to Taggart Lake, makes my long, long list of favorite places. -- Photo by Pat Bean

I get tongue-tied when people ask me what’s my favorite place among those Maggie and I have visited in our RV travels.

How do you name one among so many?

I’ve discovered beauty and awesomeness everywhere I’ve gone, from coast to coast and border to border.

I’ve ridden to the top, in a tiny cramped ball, of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, crossed the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, stood beneath Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln at Mount Rushmore, and gazed down on New York City from the top of the Empire State Building.

All these places were awesome.

But just as grand and beautiful in the eyes of this nature-loving old broad have been all the nature refuges, lakes, mountains, rivers big and small and even the trees, especially the redwoods, that Maggie and I have visited.

Yes. Perhaps that’s the answer. My favorite place is where Mother Nature resides. 

Bean’s Pat: 20 Minutes a Day: Saturday Morning http://tinyurl.com/6w8ce3h A writing prompt that had me laughing all the way through.

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Advice From My Brain and a Famous Dancer

Posted in The Write Words, Travels With Maggie, Writing, tagged , , , , , on February 17, 2012| 7 Comments »

 “It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: He catches the changes of his mind on the hop.” – Vita Sackville-West

The Write Word

Watching a sunrise is my idea of a good ritual to start any day. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Completing the rewrite of my book, “Travels With Maggie.” was high on my list of New Year’s Resolutions, yet I procrastinated doing it for the entire month of January.

February has been better because I finally turned on the light bulb in my brain and then took some advice from a famous dancer.

It dawned on me that the way I got through NANO (writing a 50,000 word novel in 30 days) was by making it the No. 1 activity of my days, which have always been filled with many eggs to crack and enjoy. So, I decided “Travels With Maggie” would be my No. 1 priority.

Any sunset is the perfect time for the ritual of counting the day's blessings. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Then I started reading Twyla Tharp’s book “The Creative Habit,” in which she talks about the importance of ritual as a way to make sure she went to the gym daily so as to keep her body in shape for dancing. It’s the same, I thought, for writers. We must exercise our writing fingers and minds daily for the most benefits.

Twyla’s ritual was the taxi cab ride she took to the gym. She knew that once she got to the gym, she would both exercise and enjoy it.

“Some people might say,” Twyla wrote, “that simply stumbling out of bed and getting into a taxicab hardly rates the honorific ritual that anyone can perform. I disagree. First steps are hard; it’s no one’s idea of fun to wake up in the dark every day and haul one’s tired body to the gym … but the quasi–religious power I attach to this ritual keeps me from rolling over and going back to sleep.”

After reading that, I decided I needed my own ritual. I made it the simple one of  setting my alarm clock to signal the end of the writing time I had promised myself.

Believe it or not it worked yesterday when I woke up in the mood to do anything but write.  Just set the alarm clock, I told myself. And I did. And I wrote.

Bean’s Pat: Writing Though Life http://tinyurl.com/7r4wmez This is a great blog for anyone writing a memoir, keeping a journal or even just blogging regularly.

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Dookie Day with a Braggart Ending

Posted in Travels With Maggie, Writing, tagged , , , , , on February 12, 2012| 6 Comments »

A bouquet of black-eyed susans to brighten my followers' day. -- Photo by Pat Bean

“You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Travels With Maggie

Dookie … Dookie … Dookie. That’s the g-rated version of my favorite S word. You know, the stuff that smells as bad as a skunk.

But it was the S-word I said several times yesterday, loud enough for Maggie to give me a quizzical look, when I couldn’t get my blog to post.

 

And a special rose to all those who nominated me for a blog award. Thank you. -- Photo by Pat Bean

My computer screen kept telling me there was an error on the page. That in itself was only worth a few dookies. It was while I was randomly pushing buttons to solve the problem and accidentally deleted two posts – the swan and the Henry Ford ones – that caused me to revert to screaming out the S-word. Maggie sat up on that exclamation.

It took me about three hours of fiddling before I finally got yesterday’s blog to post. The error, which was finally corrected, was nothing more than a wrong link for my Bean’s Pat. Why in the dookie didn’t the computer simply tell me that? I mean if it knew there was an error, surely it knew what it was.

Or am I giving my geeky, top-of-the-line computer to which I’m addicted, and which has more power than was used to take man to the moon and back, too much credit.?

Meanwhile, since I try to fill my blog with positives – because there’s already too much negatives in this crazy world we live in – I’m now going to mention that my readers have given me some awards that I failed to mention in a timely manner.

My grandmother told me never to brag about myself, but I think she was wrong. I think it’s OK to now and then give ourselves a personal pat on the back for a well-done achievement, just so long as we don’t get in the habit of playing one-upmanship.

The awards include: Three nominations for Versatile Blogger, a Kreativ Blogger award, and a Lamplighter Award. I must have done something right because they all came in the space of two days, overwhelming me. In defense, I flagged the notifications and then promptly forgot about them.

Finding them at the bottom of my e-mail messages (I was cleaning out my mailbox while trying to figure out how to solve my blog-posting problem) was the bright point of my dookie-S-word yesterday. Each of the nominators, if they haven’t already, will eventually receive a Bean’s Pat, because I think their blogs are great, too.

Now does anybody know how to recover deleted WordPress posts and put them back in the order they belong?

Bean’s Pat: http://lavenderdragonfly.wordpress.com/ Great blog of quotes to live by.

 

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Favorite Places: Pine Island, Florida

Posted in Birds, Favorite Places, Travel, Travels With Maggie, Writing, tagged , , , , , on February 6, 2012| 8 Comments »

“All things share the same breath – the beast, the tree, the man … the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.” Chief Seattle

Travels With Maggie

If you want to see wood storks, Pine Island is the place to go. One of these, perhaps the same one, sat in the top of the tree that help shade my RV from the Florida sun. -- Photo by Pat Bean

I spent a month on Pine Island, exploring such nearby places as the west side of the Everglades, Audubon’s Corkscrew Sanctuary and Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge, which were all wonderful places.

But if I wanted to see birds, which of course I always want to do, all I had to do was look out my RV window.

I was especially fond of the word storks that haunted the Dumpster area of the large RV park where I stayed. The also visited me and Maggie at our RV site.

Bean’s Pat: Ruthless Scribblings: 12 (and a half) rules for writing http://tinyurl.com/7bmd3d7 Some good things for writers to remember.

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“One Lovely Blog” Award Eases Writer’s Angst

Posted in The Write Words, Writing, tagged , , , , , on January 24, 2012| 10 Comments »

“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.” – Richard Wright

The Write Words

While I want my words to stand out like the red leaves on the tree I can see outside my RV window, too often I feel they read like one of the tiny green ones hiding in the background. It's call writer's angst. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Angst and doubt about one’s ability are part of a writer’s world, at least the ones I know. We worry that the words we put out to the world aren’t good enough. And unlike the carpenter who can redo the lopsided chair he built before anyone sits on it, we writers can’t take back our words once we’ve sent them out into the world.

This past week I wrote about Custer State Park, but in a photo caption written during a brain fart, I called it Custard State Park. I later corrected the error but not until after it had been sent out to over a 100 readers.

That kind of thing is just the tip of the iceberg, however. Self-doubt begins to seep into our psyches because we can’t write as well as Isabelle Allende or Maya Angelou; and our words fall short of a Pulitzer or an Agatha.

So why do we still do it?

I don’t know about other writers, but I suspect their reasons are the same as mine: Writing is as much a part of me as breathing; I simply can’t not write.

But some days the self-flagellation is more demanding than others in questioning if what we write is good enough.

An award that brightened my writing day.

I’ve been in that state lately, which made this morning’s recognition by a fellow writer, who gave me a “One Lovely Blog Award,” so meaningful. My writing spirit was warmly hugged by the compliment that accompanied the honor: “I cannot get over this woman and the beauty and peace she brings into my life through her photos and her posts,” http://tinyurl.com/6og645n 4amWriter wrote.

Knowing that perhaps I’ve touched one life has erased my writer’s angst – for today only of course.

As a way of passing along the award to other writers, beginning today, I’m going to put a post script to my daily blogs naming my choice for blog of the day. To make it fun, I’ll call it Bean’s Pat. I’ll award it to the blogger who either makes me laugh, cry, remember, think or be awed by beauty or nature.

Perhaps you’ll want to nominate some blogs you think deserve the honor. I’ll read them as I drink my morning two cups of cream-laced coffee.

Bean’s Pat: The Fairy Tale Asylum: So Many Names Hanging in the Dark …  http://tinyurl.com/7kfnz7q This emotional blog reminded me of my brother, Richard, who was the best of us four siblings. He died at the age of 35 of AIDS.

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Prompt Promotes Positiveness

Posted in Nature, Travel, Writing, tagged , , , , , on January 23, 2012| 5 Comments »

 “Is life to short to be taking shit, or is life too short to be minding it.” – Violet Weingarten

South Dakota rainbow: Where's your focus, on the storm or on the rainbow? -- Photo by Pat Bean

Writing

Take your name, and describe yourself using its initials. That was this month’s writing prompt for the Story Circle Network writing circle of which I’m a member.

My response was:

P — Peace-loving, pedaling, passionate, pussy push-over
A — A personality, artsy-fartsy, anger-phobic, adventuress

T — Traveler, titterer, time-waster, tolerant

B — Boisterous, birder, book-lover, bra-less

E — Enthusiastic, eclectic, energized, escapee

A — Aries, adaptive, awesome old broad, animal lover

N — Nosy, nature-worshiper, not-normal, non-venomous

My responses, interestingly, weighted in on the positive side of my attributes, as did those of the circle’s other members. Many of us expressed amazement at how good it felt to look more closely at the positive side of ourselves – and we all wondered why we didn’t do it more.

The prompt was so much fun, and personally educational, that I thought I would pass it along. I’d be delighted if you would share your adjectives in comments to this blog.

Have fun!

 

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The Magic of Enchanted Rock

Posted in Birds, Favorite Hikes, Favorite Places, Nature, Travel, Writing, tagged , , , , , on January 17, 2012| 3 Comments »

 “These is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.” – Ernest Hemingway.

The trail to the top begins by crossing a tiny creek. While the landscape was brown toned, a result of both drought and winter, it still had an enchanting beauty. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Favorite Places

I suffered from writer’s block yesterday. I usually attribute this to procrastination, specifically of putting my bum down and my fingers on the keyboard. Almost always, if I do that, I find myself cured of the disease writers dread.

But when I came across Hemingway’s quote this morning, I realized this time the block was a result of my wanting to convey to you what my Friday scramble to the top of Enchanted Rock near Fredricksburg, Texas, meant to me.

And I didn’t want to tell you the truth, that I wasn’t Wonder Woman.

As hikes go, the trail to the top of this monadock, or kopje as they would call it in Africa, was just a bit over a half mile, and with an elevation gain of only about 425 feet.

I lost sight of these markers a couple of times and had to backtrack. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Until recently I wouldn’t have considered it much of a challenge. But age caught up with me last year, and a couple of painful, physical problems slowed me down to only short, mostly flat walks.

I cried, I ranted, I raved – and thankfully I didn’t accept my regular doctor’s words “that pain was just something that came with age.” While I knew there was truth in his words, I didn’t feel that time had come for me.

A rehabilitative specialist agreed, and two weeks after beginning physical therapy, I was practically pain-free again. My scramble following the ill-marked trail to the top of Enchanted Rock was the most challenging thing I had done in a year. I was out of condition and the hike up was slow-going – but I made it.

Standing on top, with the Texas Hill Country landscape laid out before me, let me indeed feel Mother Nature’s magic.

No footprints to follow, just keep going upward I told myself. -- Photo by Pat Bean

The hermit thrush that flew in front of me, the jumbled rock patterns that to me were as awesome as a museum painting, the awesome robin’s-egg-blue  sky above with wispy clouds drifting past, and the feel of the wind on my perspiring face were all part of the enchantment.

This is what I needed to tell you.

With the Internet at your fingertips, you can learn all the geographical, historical and even mystical facts about Enchanted Rock at your leisure. Facts come with their own magic, but you don’t need me to tell you those.

I know the day will come when my body will no longer take me to the places I want it to go. But thankfully it was not this day.

 

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An Uncozy Murder Mystery

Posted in Books, Travels With Maggie, Writing, tagged , , , , , , on January 5, 2012| 7 Comments »

“Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.” – Mark Twain

New York Times best seller, "Neon Rain"

Travels With Maggie

Last night, after Maggie and I had crawled into bed in the childhood bedroom of my grown granddaughter, Shanna, where I sleep at my oldest daughter’s home because I can’t plug into an electrical outlet, I turned on my Kindle.

My neck started getting uncomfortable after I had read for about a half hour. But since I still wasn’t ready for the sandman, I switched to one of the audible books I had downloaded.

I had put off getting a Kindle for a long time because I loved the magic of holding a real book in my hand. It took all of about 10 minutes, however, before I decided the Kindle had just as much magic, perhaps even more so because if I decided I wanted a certain book, I could be reading it in less than a minute.

But back to last night. My choice of listening pleasure was “The Neon Rain,” a Dave Robicheaux novel by James Lee Burke. The book had

New Orleans' Bourbon Street in 2003 -- Wikipedia photo

been on sale through Amazon’s Audible.com and on a whim I had bought it since I had already used my two monthly credits.

While I’m a big fan of murder mysteries, I quickly realized this one, whose hero is a New Orleans homicide detective with a Vietnam past, is darker than the cozy mysteries I favor. Burke puts into words what the authors I usually read keep hidden behind closed doors.

His descriptive phrases are gritty and complete, and Will Patton, the book’s narrator, captures Robicheaux’s dark character completely.

New Orleans French Quarter -- Wikipedia photo

What kept me reading, however, was that Burke had created Robicheaux in both black and white, and made him likeable. Underneath the toughness was a gentleman with depth, and Burke’s descriptive writing captured both sides.

I recently watched the movie “Salt’ with my daughter and her husband. At the end, the three of us sort of shook our heads.

“Not really a great movie,” my son-in-law, Neal, said.

“That’s because there was never any one to root for,” I replied.

The fact that I can root for Robicheaux, and that Burke is a writer’s writer, will keep me reading/listening  to the end of “The Neon Rain.”

I will, however, continue to favor my more cozy mysteries, where the object is to simply to figure out who-done-it. But I also recognize that it’s good to once in a while be jolted back to reality and the knowledge that there is a dark side to the world – and as Twain says, a dark side within each of us’

Thankfully, most of us keep that side hidden behind closed doors.

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