Day: April 2, 2017

The Hardest Path to Walk

The hardest path to walk, the most difficult challenging in terms of morality, ethics, courage and bravery, or risk, isn’t the path that I’m taking this morning.

Yes, the coffee cup is damn full. I’ve slurped down the mocha from the brim. I’m conscious of its waves and motion as I take steps. “Easy,” I encourage myself. “Stay focused.”

No, it’s not the hardest path. It’s just walking a full cup of coffee across a public room.

Because you know everyone will notice if you spill it.

Well, maybe not.

Okay, probably not.

Still, it’s coffee.

Well, it’s just coffee.

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Top Writing Tips Posts of Winter 2016/2017

I’m always hunting reminders and new insights. I worry that my writing will be too stale, my plots have become moribund and predictable, my dialogue and the characters uttering them are trite and lame.

I worry that I don’t know, understand or comprehend enough about grammar and punctuation. Yes, there are editors who can help with these matters, but I want to be right. I want to learn. I want to be better.

And I know that I struggle to write, that I’ll always struggle, but I keep trying. So posts like this, with links to other insights, are useful to me. I never know where I’ll find a fresh nugget of understanding or a reminder.

So I repost this for others. I’m just spreading the information. The links were useful to me; maybe, they’ll be useful to you.

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Between the Cracks

It may be the time,

the energy,

or the intentions,

or the hope.

It might just be the words or the dreams.

But you notice it slipping away,

through the cracks in the space of your life.

It’s the little things, at first.

Then you notice that much of it that you took for granted as yours has gone.

You never noticed the cracks.

You saw that it was two thousand.

Then it was twenty ten, twenty eleven.

Now it’s twenty seventeen.

It was January. Now it’s April.

Today, you order yourself, searching for the words and motivations in the cracks.

Today!

Before more is lost to the cracks,

today, you will write with abandonment.

Today, you will write like crazy.

At least one more time.

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Today’s Theme Music

The end of the last century went well for me. Retiring from the military, I was living in the Bay area and was able to catch fire a start-up. I worked with diligent, capable people. We had fun and the future was exciting. U.S. Surgical and then Tyco bought us, and everything changed. We made money but it was a lot less fun.

Into this came a group with an unusual sound called ‘Smash Mouth’. They eventually had a few more hits and became well known for providing the theme music to ‘The Big Bang Theory’ on CBS, and for songs in the ‘Shrek’ franchise. Back in 1997, though, we knew them for ‘Walking on the Sun,’ with its cynical reflections on the hippie revolution, pop culture, advertising, and our future state of affairs.

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Catclave

A secret meeting of cats, it takes astute non-feline observers to recognize when a catclave has been called.

Because of their unique abilities, cats need not be in the same room for a catclave, but enter into a catatative state in close proximity to other cats. The distance for a catclave varies with cats and their catatative abilities. Younger and less experienced cats struggle with the catatative state as they’re often easily distracted by strings, food, moths, butterflies, flies, spiders, bugs, birds, noises, other animals, their tail, and shiny objects.

Symptoms of a catatative state are displayed as intense stillness with alert, erect ears. Their eyes are open to some degree. Although usually sitting upright, some cats are known to lie down with all their feet tucked in for a catclave. The latter posture is assumed to be utilized for longer catclaves. Sometimes a tail flick is observed. In studies conducted with cats by Dr. Catelson, the premiere catatologist based in Catalonia, it was concluded that tail twitching or flicking when cats are in a catatative state is an indicator the cat is catatatively speaking in a catclave. Unfortunately, someone opened a can and the experiment ended. Efforts to repeat the tests failed. Apparently, the cats had become aware of the study. Becoming catstinate, they refused to cooperate.

Cats attend many more catclaves than humans know due to the difficulties involved confirming that a catclave has been called.

It’s a cat thing.

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