I love the smell of honeysuckles

On our property we have a lot of honeysuckles. It’s that time of year where the flowers are out. It smells like spring.

May

22

23 years ago today …

I got a call from my ex girlfriend while I was at work at Chucks Shoe Repair. It was about 2 in the afternoon, and I had been at work for about an hour. I normally answer the phone, but I was working at the heel machine putting heels on a pair of wing tips. Since Domingo was the closest and he picked up the phone.

Domingo yelled “Hey Mark, some chick is on the phone for you. Say’s it’s important”.

I yelled back that I would be there in a minute, that I was finishing up on the right shoe.

The phone is towards the front of the store and the heeling machine is in the opposite corner of the store. In order to get to the phone from where I was, I had to walk right past Chuck and Domingo.

15

Ants swarm over Houston area, fouling electronics – Yahoo! News

Filed Under WTF | Leave a Comment

From the WTF file:

[via Ants swarm over Houston area, fouling electronics - Yahoo! News]
In what sounds like a really low-budget horror film, voracious swarming ants that apparently arrived in Texas aboard a cargo ship are invading homes and yards across the Houston area, shorting out electrical boxes and messing up computers.

It’s rather ironic that something so small with very little to no intelligence can actually bring down computers and other electronic equipment? Makes you wonder if government could use something like that to their advantage.

May

13

Something to think about.

Filed Under Writing | Leave a Comment

(Via Neil Gaiman’s Journal.)

books don’t get written by thinking about them, they get written by writing them.

Good advice about anything really. You can think all you want and imagine that everything is working and coming together, but you have to actually do the work to have any realization of something tangible. Until you can actually see it or touch it, it’s just something imaginary.

May

11

Nice advice from Neil Gaiman.

Filed Under Writing | Leave a Comment

From a post on Neil Gaiman’s blog

The second draft is where the fun is. In a first draft, you get to explode. The objective (at least for me) is to get it down on paper, somehow. Battle through the laziness and the not-enough-time and the this-is-rubbish and everything else, and just get it written. Whatever it takes.

The second draft is where you go and gather together the fragments of the explosion and figure out what it is you did, and make it look like that was what you always meant to do. So you write it. Then you put it aside. Not for months, but perhaps for a week or so. Even a few days. Do other things. Then set aside some uninterrupted time to read, and pull it out, and pretend you have never read it before — clear it out of your head, and sit and read it. (I’d suggest you do this on a print-out, so you can scribble on it as you go. ) When you get to the end you should have a much better idea of what it was about than you did when you started. (I knew The Graveyard Book would be about a boy who lived in a graveyard when I started it. I didn’t know that it would be about how we make our families, though: that’s a theme that made itself apparent while the book was being written.)

And then, on the second and subsequent drafts, you do four things:

You fix the things that didn’t work as best you can (if you don’t like the climactic Rock City scene in American Gods, trust me, the first draft was so much worse).

You reinforce the themes, whether they were there from the beginning or whether they grew like Topsy on the way. You take out the stuff that undercuts those themes.

You worry about the title.

At some point in the revision process you will probably need to remind yourself that you could keep polishing it infinitely, that perfection is not an attribute of humankind, and really, shouldn’t you get on with the next thing now?