Getting Your Peeps Together

        As a writer, it's important to get together with my writing critique friends. I'm lucky. I am part of two groups, I go on at least one writing retreat every year, and I have some long-distance writing colleagues who help me out from time to time.

My son, husband, daughter and granddaughter...
My husband played Santa at a Masonic Christmas party.

       However, even more important than writing get-togethers is gatherings of family and friends. If we spent all of our time hunched over our laptops, tapping away, we wouldn't have anything to write about. Life--and living life--primes the pump. It fills the well. It gives us fodder to write about and it gives us time to reflect on our writing.

      I hope that 2016 is the best year ever for you. Some of us have new struggles to deal with. Some of us have had new issues rear their heads in 2015 and are still working them through. Some of us have scary things to consider (for me: retiring from public school in May and finding a private school job). However, obstacles make us stronger--if we survive them--and oftentimes we find we have more inner strength to draw from than we knew we had.

      Happy New Year!

What's in Her Pocket?

        I once read that if you know a character well--a character you've created--you should be able to list what they have in their pocket (or purse or wallet).

        For sure, you should write a character and make it so fleshed out that you know their gestures, their quirks, their likes and dislikes.

        And what goes without saying:  the reader should also know the character as well as you do. It can't just be in your head. It has to be down on paper as well...

          As I'm working on my WIP, I hope my characters are becoming well-developed. I hope the reader--if there ever will be a reader of my WIP--ends up caring for my characters.

         Speaking of characters--my son is a character. A really quirky character. A character that I know all too well. (After all, he is responsible for most of the gray patches in my hair.) He's musically talented, a voracious reader, a god in his niece's eyes and a 2nd year med student. Which is why this story might make you shudder... 

       On Christmas we were enjoying a couple of varieties of wine. A moscato and a cranberry wine. Ian went into my mother-in-law's kitchen to open a new bottle, and came back with a full bottle of cranberry wine. He acted like nothing odd had happened. Unfortunately for him, someone had witnessed what transpired... and was eager to share the story.

       It seems that my son had an unusually easy time with the corkscrew. That sometimes reluctant cork popped out like it was on a kamikaze mission was nonexistent. 

      There was no cork. It was a screw-top bottle (nothing but the most high-falutin' libations at our family gatherings). We did make sure there were no bits of metal in the wine, shook our heads at da boy, and took several photos for blackmail posterity. (We're hoping he can soon crack open a person's chest with more knowledge than he can open a bottle of wine.)

     And to let my many three followers in on what I did last week, here's a photographic clue. I gift-wrapped books at Half-Price Books, and Radar prostituted himself for donations to Love a Golden Rescue. That pesky pup would roll over on his back and accept belly rubs for a buck a crack. If you'd like to help us get more stray goldens from Istanbul (we're getting 6-8 more in April), click on Love a Golden's link, then click on the airplane.

       Is there a photo of you that is brought out occasionally when some levity is needed? Please share...