A to Z BLOG CHALLENGE...APRIL 28, 2014...IT'S BEEN FUN

A to Z BLOG CHALLENGE
April 28, 2014

IT'S BEEN FUN!

Today was the letter X for the challenge. There are only two more letters left, and two more days left for me to put entries on my blogs. It has been so much fun.

I had no idea what I was doing, when it began. I'd never even heard of the A to Z Blog Challenge before. I surprised myself by actually posting an entry every day this month. I suppose I was being a bit ambitious, having two blogs for my first time participating. It has been a bit stressful, but I did manage to come up with all kinds of topics to write about.

In fact, most letters I thought of lots more I could have written about. I will try to do these, later on.

One of the best parts of this challenge, is the awesome bloggers that have left comments, and I so appreciate that they took the time out of their own blogging to come here and visit mine. Thank you, everyone!

I also got to read entries from other bloggers on their blogs. There sure are some awesome writers out there in blog-land! I have enjoyed reading all kinds of topics. I tried to comment on some, and will continue to visit more, even after the challenge is over.

I will be back to posting my fan fiction story on a more regular basis, in the coming weeks. Hope all who follow, will continue to stop by! I do appreciate your reading it and for your patience while the challenge has been going on.

So, all in all, I have had fun, learned a lot, and made some awesome connections!

Thanks, everyone!

Peace, Love, & Writing

BLOGGING IS FUN!

BLOGGING IS FUN!
April 13, 2014


I just felt like saying that, so I made it the title. Blogging is turning out to be so much fun. It took me quite a while to understand what to do...or at least learn enough to get some writing on here. I'm sure there are a lot more things (?) tabs, labels, widgets, and other pieces of this and that, I should try...but, for now, this is good.

I even set up another blog on Wordpress. Well, really I'd set it up a long time ago, but at the time it was hard for me to understand the set up. Now, though, I think I have enough on there, for the time being, that is working ok. I get comments and followers there too, which is wonderful!

So, this A to Z Blog Challenge I'm doing this month is fun, too. It is definitely a challenge to think of something to write about every single day, and get it posted here. It is nearing the halfway point in the letters of the month of April. I had made a list for some subjects I wanted to write about, and I mostly use them, but also I change my mind about them at the last minute. I try to write them pretty late at night, in longhand, in a notebook, then type them up on here the next day, making a few changes here and there. Also, I try to find a picture to add, which I hope makes it more interesting.

Mondays are pretty hectic since I added the challenge. That is every day except Sunday. I also do the Monday Blog writing, where I'm using my fan fiction story for that. Then I add another installment whenever I can. Hope all who are reading it, are enjoying it!

A couple of little fun facts about the story...I started writing it about 4 years ago!...I wrote it all in longhand, in notebooks (of which there are, if I remember right, 15 of them!) [the parts you've been reading are from notebook #1]...so...hope you are in it for the long haul...I know I am! There are lots more adventures that Ghost and Steve go through along the way (hey, we've barely gotten started!)

So, in conclusion, my dear readers...(just thought I'd say that :)...all kidding aside, I do appreciate so much that you take the time out of your busy day to come here and read a bit.

YOU ARE AWESOME!!!



Peace, Love, & Writing

RADIAN

Jo and Chams...they have been friends since childhood. It was always their dream to become famous rock stars. They were always practicing their music. Both played guitar and sang songs in the school's talent shows over the years. When they met Al and Caid, it was a true band that emerged at last.

Calling themselves Radian, they got gigs all over town. Everyone waved at them with their lighters or phone lights at their concerts. For small town boys, they managed to make a name for themselves.

Mostly, they played hard rock tunes...at least at a club called "Mires". That venue catered to the high school kids...no booze allowed, and no one over eighteen allowed in, either. Later on, their reputation for putting on a good stage show spread to outlying towns. They got themselves a manager by the name of Tiden...well, that was his moniker, anyway. He never told anyone his real name. However, Al got a look at his driver's liscense once; he saw Tiden's real name was Gary.

The guys in the band had a good laugh about it, but let 'Gary' think he'd pulled the wool over everyone's eyes. They laughed behind his back, called him a ho and a sap, but he got them good venues to play, so eventually, they put a halt to the jokes.

As they all went on to attend the state college together, they continued to play their rock and roll, blowing out a few fuse boxes here and there.

All was going along great for awhile, and they were of a legal drinking age by now. This did cause problems...mostly squabbling between the band members. They all wanted top billing, and that put them at odds.

One night, after drinking too much gin, Caid and Jo had a fight. Backstage, before a show, they came to blows. It seems Tiden had received a telefax from a record company, wanting to sign Radian to a record deal. Tiden decided to hide it, and not tell anyone.

This night, however, at a club called "Kane", Jo was going over their playlist from A to Zee, when he saw the communication stuck in Tiden's briefcase. He almost got caught looking at it, when Tiden walked in unexpectedly, but Tiden only shooed Jo out of the office.

Jo promptly showed the others. That started the beef between them. The contract mentioned who would be primarily featured in their concerts and publicity pictures. Jo and Chams would be at the forefront, while Caid and Al would be only in the background.

A brawl ensued, which sent them all to the ER. The nurse put a ton of emu oil on their cuts and bruises, and only a lowly bandage for Chams' lacerations on both sides of his jaws.

They eventually worked out their differences, by setting a trap for Tiden. They held his veg salad hostage, until he told them the truth about the record company. Tiden admitted he did wrong...he wasn't anti success, but he was afraid he'd lose his meal ticket, as manager of the band, when they moved into the big time of the national spotlight. As he confessed, the guys, in unison, yelled and pointed at Tiden, telling him he was fired.

As Tiden left the building, Jo, Chams, Al, and Caid high fived, then called the record company, ultimately being signed to a four record deal, tours, and rotating top billing. This was acceptable.

They went on to become one of the most popular and beloved groups, from that day to the present time. Radian made history, and brought them all fame and fortune. Just like they'd envisioned all those years ago.





Words used from crossword game are underlined.

jo                           chams                           they                     been
rock                       al                                   caid                     emerged
radian                   waved                           boy                      hard
mires                    ti                                     wool                   ho
sap                        halt                                roll                      fuse
gin                         tele                                fax                       hide
kane                      zee                                 shoo                    beef
in                           er                                   puts                     ton
emu                       jaws                               anti                     trap
veg                        den


Hope you enjoyed my silly crossword story!




Peace, Love, & Laughter!

GO WITH THE FLOW ---PROGRESS COMES TO THE BACKWOODS

We were finally getting an indoor toilet. Time had passed us by, being that we were stuck way out here in the woodsy, forgotten land. There were yew trees, and pine trees, and it was peaceful.

Now, we're no naifs...we'd heard of the newfangled plumbing, but, why should we bother. We had no city water pipes or taps out here in the sticks... at least until recently. The encroaching populated cities were closing in our idyllic solitude. They were in a rush to incorporate our vast wilderness.

I don't know what we'll do with our ox. We've had that heifer for years. We use her milk to make our favorite cheese...Brie. At first, we thought the sex of the ox was male. Then she birthed a baby ox, and the rest was history in the making. We give Grace, that's her name, a rubdown every week to thank her for providing us with her oh, so creamy milk. We even bottle grams of it to sell at the farmer's market down the hill. We net a good profit.

I dread when those effin' drunkards from city hall come jutting their chins at us, telling us to quit this place...move on or be part of their @x!# beeping city. Oy! How I would love to cane a couple of those nibs. I'm firm in being jaded. I'll openly duke it out with them...and win. I'm no dozer. I've maced nitwits before...I'll do it again.

It's apt for those ragtag litho newspapers to get everyone riled up. But then, it would be nice to have that indoor plumbing, I dare say. Mi!

Words used from crossword game are underlined.

toilet                       naif                              openly                   nib
grace                       maced                         rub                         oy
gram                       drunkards                  net                          ox
woodsy                   sex                               quit                         juts                
dread                       jade                             litho                       Brie
yew                          doze                            caned                     apt
firm                          beeps                          rush                      rag
duke                         mi                                win                       ef
oh




Hope you enjoyed my silly crossword story!





Peace, Love, Laughter!

CROSSWORD STORIES

This post is just to say a few words about my Crossword Stories. That's what I'm calling them. There may have been other writers to try this form of coming up with story ideas, but I've never ran across any mention of it. Could be they call them something else...maybe just word prompts to get the ideas to come.

I've been thinking of doing this for quite a while, but just recently tried it out for the first time. This was when I was participating in @FridayNightWrites and @WriteClub on Twitter. It is lots of fun and a good time to practice different forms of writing.

What I did was to take all the words from an online game I play, "Words With Friends", and make a list from one of the boards. Those are the words I have to incorporate into my story. I've done a few so far, and they are short, so I will lable them under Flash Fiction, also. The stories are turning out to be humorous, so far. I'm usually giggling while I'm writing them.

I plan on doing more in the days ahead. Hope you get a giggle or two out of reading them!




Peace, Love, & Laughter

TRUE STORY!

When I was a kid, Sunday morning sermons were a bit boring to me. Oh, I liked Sunday school just fine. We got to do crafts, sing kid type Bible songs, and had a small book that had stories geared to a child's understanding. There was usually a snack of cookies and kool-aid, also. It was fun to visit with your friends and show off your Sunday best clothes.

After a short break, we'd meet up with our parents, while everyone filed into the main sanctuary of the church. If allowed, friends would get to sit together. However, we'd be admonished to be on our best behavior. Unruly giggling, talking, or kicking the pew in front of us were met with a hasty removal by a parent to the outer foyer, or even outside, where we'd be reprimanded. We may or may not be brought back inside.

So, it was one fine Sunday that some friends and I were sitting there, minding our manners, for the most part, anyway. The preacher droned on and on about attendance levels, the building fund, the upcoming church events, and the missionary field work. The hustle for money came next with the passing around of the offering plate.

Passed around from pew to pew, when it got to me, I'd proudly put my small envelope of nickles and pennies in the felt lined plate...that is if I had any left after buying candy that week.

There would be singing from the hymnal songbook, which we all tried to be the one holding it. If not, we'd just get to hum along to the music, as we couldn't see the words.

By then, we kids would have dug into our pockets or little purses to bring out our pieces of crinkly wrapped butterscotch and peppermint candies to suck on. We'd trade each other for better ones, trying to unwrap them silently. At some point, one of us (usually me) would find the short orange pencil and a blank envelope in the holder in front of us to start a game of hangman. There would be little notes to each other passed back and forth down the line, and stifling our giggles was not easy.

The preacher may have been reciting his sermon, but we weren't listening. We were in our own little world in the midst of the grown-ups.

One Sunday, as we were getting restless, someone elbowed the friend next to them, pointing to the lady sitting in the pew in front of us. Soon we all were staring in amazement. The woman had teased up hair, heavily lacquered, with who knows how many days of hairspray.

Our jaws dropped, and our eyes grew wide at the horror in front of us. A spider was crawling in and out and between the woman's carefully coiffed hair do! We were spellbound. Should we tell her? Should we make a ruckus and run screaming down the center aisle? We'd probably be in trouble either way.

What if that spider jumped on us, I mean, it was only a couple of feet in front of our faces. We leaned back into our pew as far as we could, checked our watches to see how much longer we'd be sitting there before church was let out, calculating our options. What to do? What to do?

At the crucial point of fighting the spider off, or taking flight, we were saved. Literally saved from making a descision, as the preacher called for anyone needing to be saved by salvation, to come to the front. As everyone stood up, we all took off down the aisle, past the preacher and the congregation, giggling all the way out the door.

I don't know what happened to the woman or the spider that day. Hopefully they were saved, too!









Peace, Love, & Salvation

WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE IN A WORD?

There are lots of words. I like words. I write words. I like to learn new words. I even like to read the dictionary. Some words have similar meanings, some are opposites of each other. Some words are used for a certain situation and time period, then they evolve into another word entirely, for the same type of activity.

That is what I am writing about today. There are three that seem to have switched places over the years. These are....

1. Photo Albums
2. Scrapbooks
3. Smash Books

Take the photo album. For many years it has been thought of as a place to put your snapshots in book form. You buy a book that has blank pages designated for this purpose. There are lots of ways to stick them in and be a bit creative in the layout. In earlier days you would purchase little stick on photo corners to hold the photos in place. Mostly they would be arranged in a row, with maybe a caption underneath saying who was in the picture.

Later on there were the magnetic photo books. You'd peel back a clear film on the page, arrange your pictures on the sticky cardboard, then pull the filmy plastic back over them to protect them.

There were also books that had separate picture sized holders which you just slipped your photo into.

To me, that is a photo album.

Next we have scrapbooks. People have been scrapbooking for many years. It would consist of a purchased blank book, usually large. On these pages people glue in all types of things. These could and did include photos, but also souvenirs, mementos...something you wanted to save to remember. There could be bits of colored paper, cards, ticket stubs, newspaper clippings, and whatever the person felt like including in their book. It was a personal record of their interests and reflected their individual personality.

To me, that is a scrapbook.

Here is where it gets tricky, and the words seem to have switched places.
What people of today are calling 'scrapbooking' is by my reasoning, just a pretty, decorative photo album. Photos arranged on a page with some cute purchased thematic stickers or cutouts pleasing to the creator of the book.

What was once actual scrapbooking is now called a 'smash book'. It's the same as it always was, just using a different word.

When and why they switched, I don't know. I have been doing the traditional scrapbooking since I was a kid. There were a few years that I didn't glue anything into books, but I saved all my bits and pieces of items I would eventually use to fill them. When I did begin to do this, I found the words had changed as to which was which.

All words put aside, though, if you like doing pretty photo albums, or scrapbooks, or smash books, it is a wonderful and creative process. It is fun to look back at the pictures and remembrances that you saved, and for later generations to look at and have more of a sense of who you were at that time in history.






Peace, Love, & Create!

NEW PLANS!

I'm just trying this out to see what it looks like...now I'm trying out a different font....and now another one.....and now this one...ok this one looks good and it is called Georgia...hmmm...it seems pretty easy to read, so I'll go with this.

I was using the yellow highlighing of the words I write, but it was bugging me. I'd thought it would be just a solid color background, but instead it was just behind the words. The ends of the margin looked so uneven and messy. Go ahead....you can agree with me....it was pretty sloppy.  Maybe my eyesight is bad, but even now I can see a bit of highlighting behind these words. I don't think I'm doing it right, even now. Let me try something else here. Hang on, you'll see what I mean. ...Ok, now I changed it to just plain white background. Much better?  I think so, even if it was a very light color before.

Another reason I wanted to change the look is because I have some new plans to add to this blog. I will be sharing my "Fan Fiction" story with you. I wanted it to be easier to read. I will give the details in the first post on that catagory.

I am also going to try and write some "Flash Fiction" stories. I've only got one so far, but am working on more. I'd never heard of this catagory of fiction until recently. These are very short stories, quick to read.

Also, I have some Haiku poems, and other poetry I've written that I will put on here in it's own section.

You may think I'm being overly ambitious, and you'd be right. It will be a challenge for me to do all this, but it is writing, and that's what I like to do, in whatever form it may be.

Feel free to browse around, pick what interests you to read, (maybe all of it?).
Don't hesitate to leave a comment, because I do like to know if any of this is being read at all. I will let you know when I've added something new by way of Facebook and Twitter.

Until next time....happy reading!




Peace, Love, & Plans

MY WRITING........THE FIVE Ws

You've probably heard of the 5 Ws of good reporting......that being to ask and answer these questions:    What, Why, Where, When, Who, and also How could be asked.     

Here are my answers to those questions about my writing.

                                                    What?                              

What is it?   My writing.
What do you write about?    Everything I think about.   I like to write things down in all different types of formats.    I've tried all kinds of styles over the years and found them all to be fun to do.   I have written fan fiction , diarys, journals, memoirs, plays, poetry, dream journals, fiction, observations, lists, children's stories, adult stories, letters, and now even Tweets, and FB messages, and now this blog. 

Some of the earliest writing I ever did was in the form of diarys and fan fiction.   I kept diaries almost from the time I could put pencil to paper.   Fan fiction was probably next. I would make up stories using characters from tv shows I liked, sometimes mixing up the people from one show into another show.   Yes, there were some strange combinations.....think Perry Mason meets Bonanza!    And many more of this type.   Then there were the plays, as I called them, written exactly as you'd see them on a page with stage direction and scenery and acts.    Lots of these were about the popular bands and singing groups of the day.   The memoirs would be a longer form of the diary entries, with much detail included and my thoughts on them, from everyday happenings as I remembered them.    Yes, there were some that I later destroyed, because......ahem.....just because I'd not want anyone to come across them (but now wish I'd kept).     

This is just some of the things I write about.    I love to write and I will continue this writing blog next time, adding more to the What of my writing, then continuing on  to the other Ws.     

(here is an example of one of my observations......the W in the title and in this text...should it have an apostrophe between the W and the small letter s?    I wouldn't think the W is something that could be posessive, as in owning something, but I'm not sure. I will have to look it up and will report what I find to you.    That is something else I love to do......research! =  or what I formally call 'looking stuff up'!)

Until next time, hope I've entertained you with this little bit of writing!





Peace, Love, & Writing!

WRITE, RIGHT?

I'm going to come right out and say it...I am a writer.  There, it is said.  It is said by me, the writer.   Sounds good to me!   Now it is out in the open and not just words I say to myself. 

Why is this important to me?   It is because how can people who read my writing believe I am a writer unless I believe it myself.    I do believe it.  I write every day. I've mentioned my writing to others over the years, and they know what I do.   So, when I say I am a writer, they do not think it is strange...they've known it all along.

For some reason, though, it is a bit scary to commit to the actual owning of the sentence.   Sort of like, well, now I have to prove it.  People will be watching to see what I have written and making their judgements of it......is it worthy to be called 'writing'.   There is also the thinking by some that you cannot really be a writer unless and until you get paid for doing it.    Sure that would be nice, but it is not the reason I and many others write.   

I write because I have to.   There is something that compels me to write things down.   It's always been this way, as far back as I can remember.   Maybe what I write is not interesting to everyone, but it is to me.  I write what I want and hopefully others will enjoy reading it.

With that said, this is only Part One of my thoughts on writing.  There will be more to come.  

I'd be interested in hearing from you .....why do you write?

Until next time.......

Peace, Love, & Words