Today is the feast day of St. Scholastica. She's the patron saint of hailstorms. Or, rather, she should be: she prayed that something would happen to keep her brother from leaving her home when she had a premonition that she would never see him again after the end of the visit. A violent hailstorm broke out, forcing her brother to stay the night and giving Scholastica a few more hours in his company. Scholastica died three days later. She and her brother were both old folks, so this isn't a tragic story. I think it's sort of sweet.
What else is sweet is that next week here at the Literary Lab, we'll have some exciting events! Winners of the Variations on a Theme contest will be announced! Author Alexandra MacKenzie will, in her guest post, tell you about her experience of having a second book published! Davin Malasarn will post more writing advice from Peanut the dog! Michelle Davidson-Argyle will talk about how learning to write is like learning to bake bread! Okay, I don't know about those last two items; I'm making some of this up. I write fiction, remember? I have artistic license to tell lies. Life's good that way, if you're me.
Yesterday evening, on the bus ride home, I finally started writing Chapter Eight of my work-in-progress. It's the last chapter of the book set in Africa, so I'm sort of dragging my feet because I really love the Africa chapters, even though they're...well, never you mind.
Also, yesterday I noticed that some of the flowering trees in Seattle are beginning to blossom. While some of you folks have snow and ice all around, here we've got daffodils pushing up through the ground. I hope to spend some time in my garden this weekend, watching the cat sleep. I also hope to write up a synopsis for my philosophical detective story so that I can enter it in Poisoned Pen Press's contest. Did you know Poisoned Pen is having a contest? They are! Get thee to the website!
St Scholastica - not one I'd ever of! (Though it's set me off on a trail to dig out my copy of the Ed Kuepper album with the great song Maria Peripatetica on it).
ReplyDeleteThe Saints! A great Aussie band, and no mistaking.
DeleteBailey, I didn't know your book was only going to have eight chapters! If you finish this before I finish Cyberlama, then you'll have written two books to my one, I think. That makes me feel quite lazy. I must finish tonight! I am about a third of the way through my last chapter. To the finish line!
ReplyDeleteMalasarn, the Africa section ends at Chapter Eight, but then the action of that storyline shifts to Seattle, merging into another storyline that's been running parallel to the Africa narrative. The book will be, I think, 16-18 chapters long (80-90K words). So I'm somewhere around the halfway point is all.
DeleteBut you should still finish CyberLola tonight, damn you!
I mean "Ciderllama," of course. My mistake.
DeleteSpiderama.
DeleteCybermama.
Cipherbomber.
Rooster.
The last scene of CyberLulu was going really slowly. But I made good progress last night, and I felt some emotion in it. So hooray!
DeleteI'm going to start thinking in terms of scenes having a pulse or not. Dead scenes will get electric shock and injections of adrenaline.
DeleteOh, I'll be writing a post about writing and bread. Brilliant. :)
ReplyDeleteAnd Davin, AWESOME!
It will be brilliant, I'm sure!
DeleteI lived in Tacoma for a year in 1980 (got there while the ash was sitll falling) and thought it was beautiful. I liked Seattle the couple times I ventured there.
ReplyDeleteYay; I'm looking forward to seeing who the anthology authors are going to be.
.....dhole
I don't care for Tacoma much but I like the area around it. The hills are fabulous. Seattle has the Bay, the islands, the Cascades to the east and the Olympics to the west, libraries, universities, microdistilleries, the arboretum, wetlands, bike trails, professional sports, theatre, a sculpture park, music of all description, best-selling authors, et cetera. I like Seattle.
DeleteI'm also looking forward to see who wrote what. I have an idea about just one of the stories, and I'm probably wrong about it.
I can't take it!! You do know that all this stress is not good for an old man, don't you?? Oh, Elizabeth, I'm comin' to join ya!!
ReplyDelete