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"September 14, 2019"    "Prompt Words: ice-cream, arrange, exuberant, necklace, attack, gaudy, planet, mendThis is a big day for me. I am on the mend form allergies, depression, and a pulled leg muscle but moreso, I have a lot going on today. We have an ice cream social here at 6:30PM today. It will be a big event as our soft serve machine broke down a month ago and is needing repaired. Everybody is exuberant about the social because they all want ice cream. I am also exuberant because two of my brothers are coming to visit today. I haven't seen them in three years so I will be looking forward to that. Visits are difficult for us to arrange due to scheduling conflicts.I won't know whether to shake their hands or attack them for not coming sooner. I also have to study for an oceanography test next week. I am learning quite a bit about the oceans around the planet. It's too bad I will probably never visit the oceans. It seems a bit gaudy to learn about them and never see them but that is the beauty of imagination. We can visit without ever actually being there. Perhaps I will buy a seashell necklace and pretend it is a souvenir. I don't know. I enjoy the class and I am going to enjoy this day. My brothers will be here in four hours. It's good therapy for somebody who has bi-polar disorder as I do. I have been getting depressed and their visit is cheering me up. The ice cream today will also help. I hope they have chocolate! I am also going to spend part of the weekend, and the day today writing. I enter a lot of contests on WDC's sister site www.allpoetry.com. I have won numerous prizes there over the past two weeks, including three first place or gold prizes for poems I wrote. My writing is in a transition stage. You may have noticed that my entries here have more body than they did before. That is because I am writing to compete now. I want to win those Blogger of the Week challenges and the only way to do that is write something substantial. I want to win because I want to improve as a writer and winning tells me I was able to write something decent that week. Before I would just give the prompt a superficial write and hurry off to class or whatever awaited me. Now I have decided to take it seriously and put something into it. My muse left me for awhile there and that did not help. However writing is not as much about the muse as it is about skill. Proper grammar and spelling do not come by accident. They take practice. I worked for years on developing my vocabulary and spelling skills. Grammar always bored me in school and now I use it routinely. My grammar teacher would roll over in her grave if she knew I was a writer. I asked the school superintendent who was my former school secretary that very question. Did she think my English teacher knew I became a writer? She told me she had remained friends with my English teacher all of their careers and that my English teacher collected everything I wrote that she could get her hands on. She had said I was her "star pupil". She had failed me because she knew I could have performed much better and she was not willing to accept half-measures. With that in mind, I have set out to rebuild myself as a writer! I too will no longer accept half-measures! Now I have a visit to prepare for and an ice cream social to arrange. I think I will wear my Salvation Army uniform to impress. I don't want to appear gawdy. I want to be exuberant today despite being depressed! I will not wear depression like a necklace! It can attack somebody else on the planet! I'm going to mend! Prompt: "Tell us about your writing process – do you like music or quiet, is there a special place you go."I never listen to music when I am writing. I would find that too distracting. Ido listen to my air conditioner/ heater running in the background as one of the two is on most of the time. Right now it is the A/C because it is summer time in the northern hemisphere. Give it two months and I will have switched over to heat. So there is always some background noise of some kind here. I write at my table. I don't have room for a desk as I live in a dorm room. I am a resident of the West Virginia Veterans Home, which started out as a college. The rooms are dorm rooms that served as hospital rooms at one time. They are small and therefore I use my work table as a desk. I don't work all the time but believe a desk would be more comfortable if I had room. I am happy to say my work is paying off now. I write for both writing com and it's sister site AllPoetry.com. I have been winning a lot of prizes on Allpoetry because I changed my writing style. Before I would use a lot of descriptive words. I discovered that in doing so I was cheating my readers. Readers like to interpret. So instead of saying "The boy rode the red bike quickly" I now say "The boy is riding a bike". This allows the reader to "fill in the blanks." It is a strategy that has won me four first place, six second place. eight third place, and more honorable mentions than I can count in the past two weeks. I am trying it on here as well on some poetry contests but they have not been judged yet. We'll see how it goes. I am also going to try a different approach in writing short stories. I am going to try to use "active voice". Instead of telling what happened I am going to try telling what is happening. I want to bring my readers into the action. We'll see how that works out as well.  |
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