A New Year and A Writer's Oath

I start off every year with my class reading to them from Gail Carson Levine's wonderful book Writing Magic: Creating Stories that Fly. On page 6 there is a writer's oath. My students take it every year but I thought it might be a wonderful reaffirmation to my writing self on this first day of a new year.

If you happen to be stopping by today, I invite you to take the oath with me.

I offer good wishes for your best ever year of writing. Here's hoping for many wonderful celebrations ahead.

Not a New Year's Resolutions Post

I'm trying to be better this next year about setting goals but I've never been very good at it.  Instead, since I have the house to myself today with just the dog and cat for company, I decided to get a jump on things today and try to organize my drafts/files/notes for this book I've been playing with so I could get a fresh start and really write it.

Hmmmm - turns out I've been doing quite a bit of it all along.

I have been "playing" with it on Google Docs so I had no idea how many pages I'd accumulated through my 100 words per day habit.

Today - in an attempt to get a better sense of the whole picture, I copied the various files into Word. Turns out I have 217 single-spaced pages.

I'm not sure whether to be inspired or terrified.

So I'm off to start reading through and see what I've written. This is actually one of my favorite parts of writing - reading back and finding things I don't even remember writing - especially when they're good and I stop and think I wrote that?

So here's hoping I find lots of those and not the alternative,

So what's up with your writing?

After the Blizzard

From yesterday's dusting - now we're up to this.

Walking in a Winter Wonderland

The view from my front window at 2pm. The blizzard is just getting underway.

Merry Christmas

This has always been one of my favorite Christmas songs.

Wishing you all the most wonderful and blessed day.

Long time no see

I can't believe I haven't blogged here since September. It's just been that kind of school year so far. In the evenings I've had a choice of blogging or writing at least a little. Writing has to win.

I have been keeping up with my Saturday Vegetable blogs over on Healthy Writer Blog. Today's blog is Channeling Popeye on your Way to becoming a healthy writer. 

Come on over and say hello!

Post Tornado

I feel like I'm finally back in the twenty-first century.

The Brooklyn tornado took out my cable, phone and internet Thursday night and ever since it's felt like living in an earlier time.

I never thought to ever experience a tornado in Brooklyn, but Thursday's literally passed right over my house. It was one of the scariest things I've ever seen.  Apparently we had what's called a rain-shrouded funnel cloud so instead of the traditional funnel cloud, all  you see is whiteout conditions with swirling bands of rain. All I know is that suddenly everything was going sideways. Since we'd been out walking the dog only 5 minutes earlier, I'm counting my blessings.

Most of the damage was to our gorgeous old trees. So sad, but it's amazing only one life was lost. So many people were caught outside in it.

Just a few of the pictures I took walking around my neighborhood over the weekend. Most of the major cleanup was done, but the tree damage was visible. 

 

Windows from this church steeple ended up in my front yard - a block away!

 

Somewhere under all these mangled trees are my cable lines!