Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘imagination’

Epcot and NaNoWriMo Update

Posted in Favorite Places, Nature, Travel, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , on November 8, 2011| 4 Comments »

 

It's hard to improve on Mother Nature, but Epcot sure gives it a shot. -- Photo by Pat Bean

My Favorite Places

Epcot's garden depiction of Peter Pan. I could do with a little of J.M. Barrie's imagination right now. -- Photo by Pat Bean

“The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air.  All I must do is find it, and copy it.” – Jules Renard, “Diary,” February 1895

NaNoWriMo Update – 15,845 words.

Another slow going day. I’m on target to meet the 50,000 word goal, but because of commitments later in the month I had hoped to be about 1,700 words farther along than I am.

I got one difficult scene worked out today, which I had been thinking about for two days. And I went back and filled in a few holes. But I had to keep slapping my hands to keep from doing anything but minor editing to make everything agree.

It’s interesting in writing such a long figment of my imagination that I can come up with what I think is a brilliant idea, but then it contradicts something I wrote earlier. It was much easier when I wrote a long journalistic series. I had everything outlined before I started, That’s because facts are facts, and not something to be played around with, I didn’t have to remember whether my main character had blue or green eyes, and whether another character was in her 70s or her 80s.

I have to tell you that I have written one novel, also a mystery, which took me two years. I finished it, but it had holes and I never went back and fixed them. A hard copy of it still sits in a file folder. The biggest problem with that first book was that my ending lacked drama. So already I’m worrying how to put the drama in the ending of the one I’m writing now.

Or perhaps my biggest problem is that I’ve started questioning myself.

Is my book good enough? Is this what I really want to be doing? Can I continue? Is what I’ve already written just horse pucky? I think it’s these things that have slowed me down the past two days.

I feel like Edvard Munch’s woman in “The Scream.”

Read Full Post »

Okefenokee Swamp Energizes Imagination

Posted in Nature, Travel, tagged , , , , , , , on February 7, 2011| 4 Comments »

Bridge standoff at Okefenokee Swamp Park. -- Photo by Pat Bean

 “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Pogo

Travel With Maggie

 It was a fall day in 2006 when I visited the Okefenokee Swamp, a place I had once thought was as fictional as Anne McCaffrey’s Pern. I knew it only as the imaginary home of the animals in Walt Kelly’s comic strip “Pogo,” which ran in newspapers across the country from 1948 to 1975.

 Many a Sunday morning would find me curled up somewhere reading all about Pogo the possum, Albert the alligator, Howland the owl, Porky Pine the porcupine and a host of other animals that grew out of Kelly’s imagination.

 In its early days, I saw Walt’s colorful drawings as simply a comic strip about the four-legged and winged creatures that lived in a swamp. As an observant animal lover, I understood the human attributes he gave his creatures, but it wasn’t until I was about 25 that I realized he was satirizing human nature as well.

When the water levels are higher, visitors to Okefenokee Swamp Park are given a boat ride as part of the swamp experience. A drought in the park in 2006 meant no boat ride for me. -- Photo by Pat Bean

 My discovery that the Okefenokee was more than the byproduct of a vivid imagination came even later than that. While the Texas school I attended taught me a lot about the geography of Texas and the rich oil fields that lay off its Gulf of Mexico shoreline, it skipped completely any information about Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean.

 I had to learn that on my own.

For the record, the Okefenokee Swamp was once an ocean floor. It lay beneath the salt water until a sandbar, formed about a million years ago, cut the basin off from the sea. Time and the elements eventually turned it into the freshwater wetlands that today extends Georgia’s eastern coastline by about 75 miles.

Of course I compared what I saw on my day in the Okefenokee to my memories of it from Kelly’s comic strip.  What I saw made me glad Pogo’s home was not just an imaginary place.

Read Full Post »