This is how it feels on a humid summer day, the fourth of July, when everyone’s waiting for the fireworks to go off and everything is chaos. We always sit on the outskirts of where everyone is, so some of the parents take the older kids through the square – there’s a big line of us trailing along, and I’m never quite sure if we have everybody or if somebody got lost in the crowd of people. Everything is exciting here. There’s a band playing live music, and I see myself on the big screens. You can hardly see the concrete for the people and their possessions – blankets and…
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Writing updates + the beach + polaroid pictures
Hello, people. A few items of business to bring us up-to-date: we went to the beach! I’m still alive, I promise. I’m still a writer even if it doesn’t seem like it. Okay let me be honest here. Writing has not been coming easily. in fact, I haven’t written anything fictional besides the (very very) occasional flash fiction. it’s been hard. I don’t know why I haven’t been able to write. I thought I had gotten over my burnout, but I guess I didn’t. I’m still struggling with it. I’ve been writing more, though. I’m writing a story in a notebook for the first time in a long time,…
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Day Trip to Old Salem
We went to Old Salem in North Carolina yesterday. It was once a community of Moravians who immigrated from Germany for religious freedom. Lots of fun and really interesting. Definitely recommended. It took us five(ish) hours to get there and five more to get back. Here are some pictures. Because… why not? Hope before we left. Breakfast. Because breakfast is awesome. And I know you all wanted to see a picture of it. My writing gear. Not that I actually got much done… I did, however, manage to read three books: a book about CIA special weapons and equipment (I know. I’m weird.), Trixie Belden No. 11 (surprise!) and The Storybook…
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Historical Fiction, Strange Research Methods, and Other Ramblings
I have a mortal horror of getting facts wrong when I’m writing historical fiction. It’s a problem. Because when you’re inserting fictional characters in a real time period with people who actually existed… it’s kind of hard to keep things completely factual. Actually, it’s impossible. Fiction is fiction. History is history. And anything that I write isn’t going to change history. It’s just going to show people what I think about the time period. What my characters would have thought about the time period. What the time period should have been like. (Kidding. Totally kidding here.) Whoa. Feels good to get that off my chest. (Not to mention, I now have an…
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Field Trip to Dover Cemetery
Today we went up to Dover Cemetery as a spur-of-the-moment trip with some friends. It’s a really interesting place, but sad because it’s so run down. Everything is grown over with little pine trees. Some of the gravestones were unreadable, and others were just rocks stuck in the ground to mark a grave. We paid attention to the dates of birth and death. Some of the children buried there died at only a few months old. Another girl was fourteen. These rocks were piled over what we assumed was another grave. Fascinating… Besides the fact that I love history and looking at all the graves was very interesting, we had…
