writing

WestVirginiaVille: Office of Paragraphs — I’m now a staff member! Woo Hoo!

/ wvfurandroot / 3 Comments

PRESS RELEASE: Our ‘Office of Paragraphs’ Ministers Up

I’m very pleased to accept a position as Minister of the Office of Paragraphs over at WestVirginiaVille.com.

WESTVIRGINIAVILLE is a selective & opinionated guide to some of the best writing, photography, video, and news on the life and times of West Virginia. They create their own multimedia features and also curate from other sources and take suggestions, too.  As the news business contracts and changes, feature and news-feature stories are often the first to go. This site is an attempt to fill that gap.

Take a gander at the site.  It soft-launched today and will gear-up in the days to come.  The goal is to have fun while creating and curating meaningful content.  Woo Hoo!

COVID-19: Day 44: Getting a groove on.

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I’m settling into this.

I haven’t had much to talk about. I work. I  clean. I eat. I nap.  I sleep.  Day in and day out.

Yesterday, a friend approached me with a writing project.  Woo Hoo!  I need assignments to write and this one even came with a writing prompt.

“and she spilled it before he could tell her no”  — prompt from Bobby Lee Messer

I had to turn that into a 90-second spoken word story.  I did.  It takes a long while to write 250 cohesive and coherent words.  I figure I’ve got 5 hours and change into the latest draft.  Shorter is harder.

Tonight, I’m kinda embarrassed to say, I broke quarantine and had my mom in for dinner.  I cooked tacos.  By the time I carried them down the hill they were going to be cold.  We can’t be having cold (and wet, it’s raining) tacos.  So, we sat almost six feet apart and had dinner together.  You may recall that tacos My Way are my favorite meal.

It was nice to have an in-person conversation.  I did, however, unceremoniously throw her out once we were both eating. It’s one thing to bend rules.  It’s another to shatter them.

 

COVID-19: Day 19: Another Acceptance

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Today was a long day.  Every minute seemed an hour and the work I was doing was just not engaging my brain.  I checked my personal email and discovered that I had been accepted to read for the Writing Conference of Northern Appalachia’s Facebook Live readings.

I’ll be reading The Plum on April 27th at 8 p.m.  Details to follow.

I’m excited and nervous.  This reading is via Facebook and a laptop camera.  I’m sure to have 17 chins and look like death warmed over.  I don’t video well.  Not in the least.

But I’m honored to be a part of this.  It certainly livened up my day.

I’ve now found a home for all my orphan writings that I think needed one.   It is time to write something new.  I’m finding that hard.  I have the attention span of a gnat.   I keep reading various articles in the vein of What To Do With Yourself While Quarantining.  Most stress not to expect too much of yourself.  Most of us grieving in some fashion and there’s a period of adjustment that we need to go through.

However, I’m desperate to find equilibrium.  I’m getting there.  My daily schedule helps.  Talking to friends and family helps.  And blogging helps.  Thanks for reading.  OH!  And please comment.  I love comments!

 

COVID-19: Day 15

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In the days to come, I fully expect to lose my internet connection. It happens now and again, and Lord knows it’s a stressed system right now.   I will, probably, at that time be a tad difficult to live with.   Fortunately, I live alone.

Just think about it for a bit.  How would you cope with being quarantined at home, without Facebook, Netflix, online games, email, Zoom, etc?  We are staying in touch with one another while keeping our distance.  Imagine how lonely it would be without this technology.  The same technology we often complain about as making us less human.  I, for one, am a fan and have always been since I first played around with a 1200 baud modem.

My sleep has been disturbed for some time now, but it’s gotten worse in the past few weeks.  I’m waking every two to three hours and getting up.   So, at 3 a.m., I found an email from an online magazine I had submitted a short story to.  It’s the best rejection I’ve ever received.  My head is swollen and the hit of confidence it gave me cannot be underestimated.  I have been on a high all day long.  Here’s a snippet:

It’s clear from the opening quote and the following paragraph that you have taken a great deal of time to master your craft.  You read like you’ve been doing this for decades.  Your writing is simple, yet interesting, visual, and compelling.  In short, it’s exactly the writing style we love.

Yes, that’s from a rejection!  Ain’t it sweet!

So, at 3 a.m., I got a hit of communication via a technology that I adopted early during a lonely hour that made my day — maybe my month  Every writer wants to “master your craft.”  Woo Hoo.  See?  I’m still giddy

An aside:  if you want to read the rejected story.  It’s here.  I had actually withdrawn the piece from the Rejection People because someone else accepted it, but apparently, the email writer didn’t get that email.  The people who accepted it?  Their email was two sentences — essentially thank you and we’re going to run it.

I adopted the internet as my playground in 1989.  I had a job without much to do and a USENET connection.  This was before sound, color, video or even images save for the occasional ASCII drawing.  USENET was a playground.  There was a discussion group for anything and everything a person could possibly be interested in.  I hung out in the parenting, cooking, Tom Robbins and gardening groups.  This was back when there were so few people on the internet that you recognized email addresses (everyone’s identifier) and names.  “Oh, yeah!  That’s Mike from rec.gardening!  Nice guy.  Grows roses.”

The internet has been so good to me.  You won’t hear me badmouth it or social media.  I think it’s what you make it.  Facebook and writing are my two hobbies.  I’m good at them.  I plan on enjoying them especially during this COVID-19 shelter-in-place.

So, drop me a line,  Keep in touch, y’all.