%%USERNAME%%    %%ACCWORDS%% %%ONOFF%% |
 |   Reflections and ruminations from a modern day Alice - Life is Wonderland |
|
Reflections and ruminations from a modern day Alice - Life is Wonderland  Welcome to the place were I chronicle my own falls down dark holes and adventures chasing white rabbits! Come on In, Take a Bite, You Never Know What You May Find... "Curiouser and curiouser." Alice in Wonderland    |
| 30-Day Blogging Challenge PROMPT November 19th As I’m sure you’re aware, November is NaNoWriMo and the site is abuzz with novelists typing furiously to reach their word count goals. What motivates you to write? Writing has always been cheaper than therapy. That sounds a bit cheeky but writing has largely been the way I processed and dealt with things that happened to me in my life, be they traumatic or wonderful. As far as blogging and writing non-fictional pieces, it gives me the opportunity to examine how I feel about things and reflect on the effects those experiences have on me as a person. I believe it is true that there is always some degree of truth in fiction, so there is almost always something I can learn about myself as I craft characters and lay out the basic plot lines that become my stories. I'm motivated by the method, by the discoveries that I make through writing. I'm also motivated to leave something behind for my daughter. I write a lot of her through the various stages of her growth and development. When I was pregnant I asked a lot of questions and was struck by how many mothers said they could not remember things that I assumed would be indelible like milestones or experiences as a young parent. I never wanted to lose those memories, those moments. By writing about them, about her, I feel that I leave this record for the both of us. She can read through my writings and remember what she was like as a child, but also and most importantly, realize I was there with her...cheering her, teaching her and loving her through it all. I've never attempted Nano...even this 30 Day challenge is something I need to work at all the time. I know I need discipline. I know that I could be so much more as a writer if I could devote the time and the discipline to the craft. This is perhaps my biggest frustration...that I love to write, that I believe that I have some ability to write, and that it is always the thing I do last...the thing that gets the back seat in my life, because well...life gets in the way. |
| "Blogging Circle of Friends " DAY 2188 November 15, 2018 "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." With that in mind, what's beautiful to you? Beauty is a highly relative quality which gives it a wonderful kind of power. I often tell my growing daughter to "be your own beautiful", encouraging her to take all the liberties the quality of being beautiful affords her, inside and out. I find many things beautiful, chief among those things are my daughter's sea-change eyes and her ever evolving spirit. Beauty is a reflection of what is inside us as much as anything else. My daughter has a kind heart and that translates into a beauty and serenity that I see more and more as she matures. I have learned to take more time to appreciate the things in the world that I find most beautiful. I spend more time taking in my most favorite landscapes, like the beach forest of the Outer Cape in mid-August or that first new virgin snow on a crisp winter morning. I love flying over the cranberry bogs in the Fall, with airplane casting a shadow over the ripe, red berries floating below us. |
| 30-Day Blogging Challenge PROMPT November 15th Have you ever had a lucid dream? What was it about? If you could control your dreams, what would you want to spend your dreams doing? I am not an active dreamer, most likely because I am not a brilliant sleeper. Without the foundation of a solid night's sleep, it must be difficult for any dreams, let alone lucid ones, to take root and spread their nocturnal ribbons around my slumbering brain. There was a short period in my mid teens and early twenties when I suffered from the same reoccurring nightmare. It was very lucid and very violent. It always began with a chase, the surge of panic as I tried to get ahead of the danger. It always ended the same way, with me watching my blood pool below me and my hands at my throat. I always woke as the blade bit flesh, often with the scream still hanging about me. It made for interesting sleepovers and more than one bewildered college roommate. It was disturbing enough that I talked with a professional about it once or twice. I tried writing about it and I even briefly considered it could be part of a past life. Eventually the dream came less and less often until it disappeared altogether somewhere in my late twenties. I still can remember that quaking panic as I fled from that unseen attacker and I am grateful whatever was inspiring the lucid nightmare was somehow resolved. If I had control of my dreams, I think I'd like to see some of my stories brought to life in them. I'd like to see my characters and the story lines played out in lucid, living color...a private showing of a movie of my own making. It might be nice to examine my fiction in that way, with dimension and physical movement. If I could script a dream just for me, I'd spend the midnight hours traveling by train or taking one of those incredibly expensive Viking cruises. I'd love to take the European River cruise and spent my sleeping time drifting down the Danube or spying on fairy castles on the Rhine. I'd dream and dream hard...taking in all those magical sights that I could never afford in real life! |
| 30-Day Blogging PROMPT November 14th It's time for another prompt from the War Chest! Take a stab at this one: Share your first experience with love. No ... not like that. This prompt is challenging because my interpretation of love has evolved so much over time that I'm not sure I'd define some of my first experiences as "love" in the traditional manner. My first crush is pretty evident in my memory, a boy named Brian Bradshaw who was the blonde and blue-eyed apple of my eye from first grade to fourth. My first experience with love though, that's become much harder to pin down. Looking back, my first boyfriend wasn't love...nor was my second or third. The guy I dated through high school felt like a frustrated experiment dripping with teen angst, not the kind of love that sustains one through even the first semester away at college. My first real long-term relationship might have been love but it was the kind that disguises itself as a red, pulsing passion that so easily hid the violence and jealous rage at its core. That was a love I had to save myself from, flee the broken glass and broken promises, clenched fists and whispered threats. Then, I've also buried love, the kind of love that falls prey to demons and addiction no matter how badly you pray and fight to love it. Sometimes love is not enough to save someone from themselves, that is the kind of love that breaks you in ways you can never really fix again. You leave that kind of love in the ground, along with the hope you once had that it would grow and bloom in that once in a lifetime love. My first experience with love, the real, sustaining love was when I met my husband. It was that warm, healing kind of love that seeps across the wounded places in your heart like a soothing balm. It was the kind of love that powers a life together. I thought at the time that it was also the most powerful love there was but even then I have been proven wrong. When my daughter was born almost nine years ago, the love I experienced was that epic, all consuming, full blown forever, I would die for this person...love. It was the kind of love that grew inside me, under my heart, connected to my soul. It is the kind of love that grounds me, makes me want to live each day the best version of myself I can be...for her. It is the kind of love that knows no limits, no conditions and no end. |
| 30-Day Blogging Challenge PROMPT November 13th "If you do what you really want to do, you feel like you're playing." - Stan Lee (1922-2018). Stan Lee passed away yesterday, Monday November 12th. What is your opinion of superhero movies? Were Stan's stories a part of your life? Okay, admittedly I had to google Stan Lee. I am not a huge superhero fan but I still felt oddly ashamed that the name did not ring any bells given how prolific the Marvel universe is in the entertainment world. Clearly the man was a giant and I should really get out from under that rock once and a while! Stan Lee and his movies have not had any impact on my life, I have enjoyed some of them. I really liked the Avengers. I found it refreshing and entertaining. It was a great escape, which is something I value highly in my movies. Lastly, there is this...I know there is this vast world of difference between Marvel and DC, but as a child I was virtually obsessed with Wonder Woman. Linda Carter was my amazonian goddess hero and I had the under-roos to prove it! I would race about the house in those themed underclothes, with my cape and my arm bands, fighting evil before taking off in my invisible jet. From the age of 6-9, Wonder Woman was my jam. Seriously. |
| 30 Day Blogging Challenge PROMPT November 9th Did you know? The veins of a blue whale are so wide, a 3 year old child could swim through them? Spend your blogging time today thinking about size. Scale is important in writing - how do you use it? If you're up for it, try examining something extremely small and describing it as if it were the size of a car. Can you get your readers to guess what you're describing? For some reason I am finding these challenge prompts to be very taxing on my muse lately. This one comes as no exception. Size isn't something I spend a lot of time thinking about, at least not in sense of the physical scale of things. As far as describing something small that's the size of car...well I will give that a shot but I'm not overly optimistic  . The sun was rapidly waning, giving over to the painted summer evening sky in small increments of diminished light. Even as it sank, several stubborn rays clung to the hem of her stiff skirt, setting all the tiny crystals ablaze with its light. The setting sun moved across her petite frame like a loving shadow, as she turned smoothly on one delicate toe. The music that had played once played so robustly, too seemed to be fading with the daylight. The chords seemed to stretch and then die out as the notes dropped off as if with the day. The square where she performed had emptied as well. People and their packages rushed away, off to their winter night lives. Free from their admiring gazes, she longed to lower her arms and relax her posture. She wanted more than anything, to open her angelic eyes and watch the sunset. She indulged the fantasy of tossing off the rigid headpiece, shaking her long hair free and climbing down from the pedestal to stand on the cold stone in flat, bare feet. Any guesses? |
| 30-Day Blogging Challenge - Nov 8th You've made it a full week! Congratulations! Today I want to know, what do YOU think makes a good blogger? What are characteristics that make you want to read someone else's blog? If you were judging your own blogging ability, how would you rate yourself? What aspects of blogging are most important to you? Some days it takes a lot for me to blog...like today, my day job is tearing me down from my ankles up and I'd much rather go home and crawl into bed than actually formulate a blog. But...its too early to start in on a glass of wine and I've made this commitment to myself to at least try to blog daily to keep the creative switch on. So obviously, I'm not an expert on what makes a writer a good blogger but I have a sneaking suspicion it could be dedication? Or the will to blog often and with meaning. I think the blogs I enjoy reading the most are the ones that are candid and open. They are filled with personal stories or opinions that connect me to the writer, the details I can relate to are what draw me in. What is important to me about blogging is that it is always there, like a reliable friend with a good shoulder and good ear for listening. It gives me comfort, gives me a voice. So, even on those days that I really am not "feeling it", it is still an outlet that inspires me to read and contribute too. |
| "Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise" Day 1787 November 7, 2018 Prompt: There are two kind of writers: plotters and pantsers. Plotters outline, planning their beginning, middle and ending. Pantsers don't write first drafts. They fly by the seat of their pants. Are you a plotter or a pantser? I am by all accounts a pantser. I would love to have the organization and the discipline to be a plotter but I just do not possess either of those traits when it comes to my writing. When I have an idea, I tend to bust through it, writing in a great initial bursts for as long as I can. I do go back and edit my drafts but I do not usually change it or revise it in any meaningful way that would make it an official "first draft". It is something I feel I need to work on as a writer. I need to develop more discipline and take the time to plan out the pieces so that when I run out of steam, I have somewhere to pick up and go back to. |
| 30-Day Blog Challenge Nov 7th Wednesdays are the days I get to pull a prompt from the “Challenge War Chest!” These are prompts that have been suggested by bloggers over the years. Today’s prompt is: The color green. What do you associate with the color green and how does it make you feel? Green is a color of dichotomy for me. It represents the new, bright growth of new grass and the daffodils that break from the soil in early Spring, their green tips a harbinger of warmer weather to come. It is also the color I associate with greed and envy. Green has a connection to dirty money, to jealous rumblings in the gut and to the creeping excess of the obscenely wealthy. The color reminds of Kermit the Frog. I grew up watching the Muppet Show and was a huge fan of Kermit's sweet nature and flailing arms. I had a stuffed doll that accompanied me most places in the way some children carry around a security blanket. It is also the signature color of Wicked's famed Elphaba, another character that captured my fascination. I saw the Broadway production of Wicked at the Gershwin in New York City with Idina Menzel playing Elphaba against Kristin Chenoweth's Glinda. Menzel's rendition of "Deflying Gravity" brought me to actual tears. Green is a problematic color when picking exterior paint for the aircraft we sell. Green, in all its variations, does not have a wide appeal to potential aircraft owners and using it in any scheme tends to translate into an aircraft overstaying it's time in inventory. It makes the list of colors we steer very clear from when designing aircraft paint schemes. Perhaps buyer's subconsciously associate the color green with nausea? We can't sure sure but we play it safe and avoid it. Overall the color green reminds me of my daughter's eyes. Her eyes are a sea-change shade of green, somewhere between a deep Jade and a smoky gray. There is no relative alive or in recent memory, who has possessed such eyes. My husband and I are convinced that somewhere along one of our bloodlines resides an ancestor who is responsible for those unusual peepers. |
| "Blogging Circle of Friends " DAY 2179: November 6, 2018 Prompt: Write about Emptiness Emptiness can be a dangerous and isolating feeling. There are times when life seems devoid of the kinds of joy and activity that keeps the wheels in motion. If you give in to the feeling, it can pull you down. I've been fortunate to never know the battle with chronic depression. I get depressed and overwhelmed but I can typically work through it either by writing or forcing myself into an activity to distract me from feeling catastrophic about things. I can understand the struggle so many people face however who are unable to pull themselves free of that bleakness. I have such empathy for people who feel themselves to be trapped in the dark and empty spaces of this life. I tell my daughter that it is so important to always be kind, to default to kindness because we can never know the battles someone is waging inside. "Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise" Day 1786--November 6, 2018 Prompt: Information Do you like being informed about everything there is, and what do people mean by “too-much-information”? And how much Information Is too much information? I am a typical type A personality and by default I feel compelled to "know" everything. Closed door meetings of which I am not included, give me anxiety. Finding out the details after the fact, or just a bit too late, is a huge frustration for me at work. I make it my business to know all the information I can, it is the best defense against things going wrong or out of one's control. The phrase "too much information" in my opinion refers to strictly personal things. My sister, though I love her to pieces, is sometimes a too-much-information type person. I can't tell you how many times I had to listen to her description of some gross detail she had to deal with at her doggie daycare, or self-surgery she participated in. There are many things I would be inclined to keep to myself on a personal level for sure. If something makes me feel queasy or uncomfortable, I would definitely label it "too much information". |
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
