Question: Can you really eat a Hostess chocolate cupcake in only two bites?
Answer: Yes, though it is not advisable to do so. A love of chocolate, a random craving for something ridiculously sweet, and some bitter frustration are usually required to accomplish this successfully. The second cupcake will also be consumable in this manner, if the first one didn’t adversely affect the ill humor.
Ah, that one helped.
Some good information about copyright laws from Brad Templeton at Neat New Stuff.
I’m going to cheat here and steal a post from Learning to Spin I put up this morning:
"Okay that’s it. I need more imagery in my life. Not red, green, blue or tall, dark, short, but supple as a willow bending in a 100 mph wind. The color of sugar heating into carmel. As if the drought had lasted through the Ming Dynasty. Ripe watermelon breasts and kiwi nuts.
I read a story last night that had images flying hither and thither through my mind like Walthrip at Daytona. I tried to sleep by counting Willies. For hours I flipped around in bed like an unresolved fried egg, and when I finally fell asleep it was to wake to need for imagery. In my life. In my words.
"Reflection" is now seriously once again under major construction. Like Michael Jackson’s face."
I am astrologically a Scorpio and yes, it does throw a kink into my personality type. For whatever creativity comes out of me, I am grateful. Hot or cold, true or false, big or small, these are where I am comfortable. Middle of the road is forbidden territory so I don’t tend to explore the subtleties of description.
But I will learn, or die trying.
What is it that makes the last words we have written the very best of all? Why are we so soon disenchanted with a story we have lived with and within, fickle when a new one comes along.
Playing with flash fiction, shorties that must grasp and hold on with just two fingers, I once again am lost within a new one when it grabs my own mind by some thought or word or action. Leave behind those that did not flow as easily or well. And those that I was sure were the peaks I strove to reach, no longer can excite me when the latest, greatest story comes around.
And I need time. I need to learn the techniques of the software that intrigued me into spending coin and effort in new directions. This latest great idea I think I see as visual with text, soft audio to dramatize and draw one in. That makes two now, waiting for the knowledge and the skill of new media methods to be learned.
My own touching that of centuries before in monophonetic Gregorian Chant. Hearing once again the unearthly tones that make me think of whale song, and something more. Further back in memory, then it stops in space of time. My eyes tear up, the funeral masses at St. Michael’s as a child. Single clear soprano ringing to the arches, filling up the great expanse of holy space. The smell of flowers, yes, the ghastly smell of flowers…
And in the classroom, more. Young voices raised and singing, learning, crying the chant as well.
The morning creeps up on me with whispers of chances, tempting and simple delights. By day end I’m jaded, weary and lost, and sleep till the dawn comes again.
I don’t care what the scientific logic be, the sky is saturated with color from absorbing the prior day’s rain.
But logically, it may be said that it would fade, be watered down to pale, or just the opposite, darken with the water loss. Some explanations, I then say, go beyond the scientific and enter the realm of the imagination and be the better for it.
When and where inspiration hits is not controllable, but once we notice a trend, it does us well to take the opportunity. Cars and showers are two likely candidates–when we are furthest from our keyboards. The writer’s dilemma if you are prone to creative strikes at these particular times.
I wondered why–and since have learned–my toenails grow so long. The best time, as we know, for trimming toenails is when they’ve softened from the shower. Aha! I barely dress for the mad dash to the computer, why would I jeopardize the loss of an idea to stop and cut my nails!
Are you one of them? Pull off a sock and check.
Valentine’s Day was normal. I got my dark chocolate covered cognac, and he got an apple pie. With which I struggled because they really didn’t have great pie apples this time of year. And the crust was odd, requiring no addition of cold water, yet dry and crumbly so that the bottom was pieced together and the top was rolled out a couple times. According to my husband, his grandmother rolled, sprinkled it with flour and water, folded, and rolled out seven times–last night he claimed it was fourteen. Thought that when he made a pie himself ten years ago he had learned this was folly itself, and no one really, really rolls it out that many times. But calling Grandma a liar is not a nice thing to do, especially on a romantic holiday.
Thank God for all those liquor-filled chocolates yesterday. I actually had fun, and didn’t mind sweeping all the dough off the flour when I was done.
I sit in the campus library reading. Research and reading. Sometimes I’ll wander over to the computers, but they are alien, do not know my favorites, do not respond with ah, Susan, there you are.
And they are sated and uncared for, filled with temporary files and useless data that has been copied, left behind. I try to pick a different computer every time, release its memory that no one wants again.
And when I leave, the chosen one will always smile and hum goodbye.
I am awakened with a kiss and the news that the Valentine’s Bunny has been there during the night. "Hurry! Hurry!" he says, "He’s left something and I think it’s for you!"
Barely awake, bouncing off walls, down the hallway I follow. On the kitchen table, I see the plastic bag it came in first, then the cognac-filled dark chocolates from the Polish market. "Oh my," I say, "the bunny must have been in New Britain." "Yes," he says, "I think I saw him there on Friday when I got the kielbasi. I think that was his red Jag parked out front."
He can always make me laugh. From Christmas morning catalog poses just to try on a new shirt, to skipping down sidewalks and flapping his elbows in flight to a tune on the radio when driving.
Hope your Valentine’s Day is one of love and laughter.
I normally don’t do memes, but because it was Loretta of Pomegranates and Paper, AND it was her birthday, how could I say no? So:
What is the total number of music files on your computer?
none
The last CD you last bought?
Are You Ready for The Country by Waylon Jennings
What is the song you last listened to before reading this message?
My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys (in the movie, The Electric Horseman)
Write down 5 songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you.
"If You Go Away," "Time In a Bottle," "Nothin I Can Do About It Now," "If You Can Touch Her at All," "I’m On Fire"
Favorite song about food?
"I Wanna Be an Oscar Meyer Weiner"
Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
Sallie at At The Heart of It, because of her sensitivity, Anne at Fishbucket ’cause she’s fun no matter what, and there’s a six-way tie on the third one.
Crap. The memory’s finally straightened out, and I’m hooking up the new hard drive as a slave so that Win 98 will acknowledge the 40-gigs when I f-disk and format it and then I can transfer all the data onto D from the 1-gig C drive and then disconnect the C drive which will automatically make D into C, providing I have the jumpers set right, and, and, and…
the monitor isn’t working.
In a conversation yesterday with a neighbor who had brought something in to frame, he admitted to his love of reading–three books a week!–and his growing disenchantment with contemporary novels. He mentioned in particular author Tom Clancy, and his latest book (which his wife had given him) which evidently is part of a series that is co-authored.
It seems that some of the big names are employing the use of co-authors, etc., going all the way to making money simply off the use of their name alone, having nothing to do with the book in any way creatively. Judging by the diminishing quality of some of these author’s output, I suspect more of them are using fill-in writers than they are willing to admit. I have noticed for example in a Danielle Steel early novel versus a more current one (I have only read two of them out of curiousity) there is almost a boilerplate format for story. Variations of maybe 10 out of the supposed 37 plots.
There are software programs available to beginning writers to help provide a narrative storyline. Good for practice, maybe, but I tend to believe that there are so many good writers around, that the only thing that is going to make someone stand out is that magical gift of perspective. This is what seems to be disappearing in the large scale publishing world, and what both literary journals and online publishing may indeed be able to give a voice and keep alive.
Golden yellow air and bright white flakes of snow, reluctantly they fall, confused by sunshine and so scatter aimlessly about.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology