friday five

Friday Five: The Paint Dilemma

/ Tracy Abell / 10 Comments

           

In a little while, a friend is coming over to help me paint.
We’re going to paint bits of walls and cabinets in an
attempt to choose the right colors to de-Frankenstein my kitchen.
You see, my cabinets are now a shade of green which is tolerable in natural light
but under artificial light, is like a bad acid trip.

We have a slew of samples to choose for walls (I have one "accent" wall which is an affront to humanity)
but also these five shades of gray-black (and yes, I realize they look green and brown) for the cabinets.
Black cabinets? 
Yes, black cabinets.
An interior designer floated the idea and we’re going to give it a whirl.

Five whirls, to be precise.

Have a great weekend and may you all love your kitchens just as they are!
             

Friday Five: The Take It From Me Edition

/ Tracy Abell / 12 Comments

            

1)  While it’s good to have teen sons responsible for the weekly cleaning of their bathroom,

2)  it’s probably best to now and again check on the actual "cleanliness" of said room

3)  because those little microorganisms can gain an astoundingly tenacious foothold on all surfaces

4) and you will need a strong stomach plus a haz-mat suit to battle them

5)  but as long as you have Jimi Hendrix on the boombox, you will PREVAIL.

Wishing everyone a happy weekend (and depending on your mental state, you may or may not want to check the kids’ bathroom).
              

Friday Five: The Deep Thoughts Edition

/ Tracy Abell / 12 Comments

    

1)  One of the very best ways to strengthen a relationship is to share some laughter.  And maybe a beer or two.

2)  You should floss only the teeth you want to keep.

3)  In order to maintain yoga focus, it’s best to first intervene with the flicker that’s drumming his sturdy beak against the aluminum rain gutter.

4)  The best kind of pen to write with is the one you actually pick up and use.

5)  I know you are, but what am I?
               
Wishing everyone a glorious weekend filled with thoughts that come from the deeper end of the pool than these!


                                                                                            © 2010 Tracy Abell          

Friday Five: The Marilynne Robinson Edition (Part Deux)

/ Tracy Abell / 12 Comments

        

Last week’s Friday Five with Marilynne Robinson went over well
so I thought I’d share some more insights from her scary-smart mind:

1)  Be aware of the effect metaphor has on other metaphors.  Rather than writing your story as "beads on a string," view it as a resonating chamber in which all pieces must be affected by whatever else is vibrating.

2)  If you write with a public in mind, you’re dead.

3)  When you’re writing something and encounter great difficulty, don’t be discouraged.  You can’t write good fiction if you feel you already know everything about what you’re writing.  Stumble on something?  It means it’s a legitimate question.  Set it aside and let your mind do the work.  Don’t have to flail away until you find a "solution."  Don’t force the issue by using your Front Office Mind.

4)  Your Front Office Mind is how you operate on a daily basis (getting rid of telemarketers, making appointments, etc.)  The Front Office Mind is not the mind you use when you write.  The other mind, the middle mind, is where all the work is done; it’s been thinking about things for a very long time, waiting for you to ask. 

5)  Short story has a responsibility to itself: the posing of a question that somehow answers itself.

Bonus gem:  Pay attention to when you’re writing well so that it’s easier to fall back into that mode the next time.
              

Friday Five: The Marilynne Robinson Edition

/ Tracy Abell / 18 Comments

 

In May-June of 2003, I had the great good fortune to study with Marilynne Robinson for three weeks at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

MarilynRobinson
Here are some gems from Marilynne:

1)  If you have any luck at all, when you sit down to write you won’t end up writing what you intended at all.

2)  You can’t find a story without writing it all out (don’t focus on page limits or word count).

3)  Don’t be loyal to the investment you’ve made in a weak scene instead of loyal to the scene itself.  Does it deserve to die?  If so, then kill it, no matter how long you’ve sweated over it.

4)   A character shouldn’t look like a type but a personality.

5)  The tension in a piece of fiction is not how it ends but how it arrives at its ending.

Bonus Gem:  You should always keep something in front of the reader’s eye; it’s like leading a blind person through the reader’s house.

Friday Five: The I-Love-March Edition

/ Tracy Abell / 8 Comments

         


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1)  March 5 . . .   +  2 mins 35 secs

2)  March 6 . . .   +  2 mins 35 secs

3)  March 7 . . .   +  2 mins 36 secs

4)  March 8 . . .   +  2 mins 36 secs

5)  March 9 . . .   +  2 mins 36 secs

By my calculations, that’s roughly 13 minutes of additional daylight in the next five days!
If I still lived in Anchorage, I’d be gaining another 29 minutes of daylight.
But I’ll take the 13 since those minutes come without mosquitoes.

Have a great weekend and enjoy the longer days!
            

Friday Five: The Color Edition

/ Tracy Abell / 6 Comments

     

I’m currently reading R.A. Nelson’s DAYS OF LITTLE TEXAS, and came across this line:
The next morning the sun comes up like three-day old orange juice. 

And I thought, wow.

Later, I was hooping while listening to Regina Spektor, and heard this:
Blue lips, blue veins
Blue, the color of our planet
From far, far away

So then I started thinking about colors
and how they can create such powerful imagery.

I grabbed a book off my nightstand, Laraine Herring’s WRITING BEGINS WITH THE BREATH,
and found this:
The yellow, diamond-shaped sign with the words "SNOW ZONE" on it was covered with snow,
revealing only "S  W   NE" to drivers.

From my bookshelf I opened T.C. Boyle’s THE TORTILLA CURTAIN to this:
His hair was red, for one thing — not the pale wispy carrot-top  Delaney had inherited from his Scots-Irish mother, but the deep shifting auburn you saw on the flanks of horses in an uncertain light.

And Carson McCullers’s THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER:
Besides his workbench and chair there was a heavy safe in the corner, a lavatory with a greenish mirror, and shelves full of boxes and worn-out clocks.

Can’t you just picture all that?
Wishing each of you a glorious weekend filled with COLOR and life!
                      

Friday Five: Notebook Love

/ Tracy Abell / 23 Comments

       

1)  I love spiral-bound notebooks.

2)  I love this notebook I’m using for revisions,
a notebook formerly used by Wildebeest:

3)  I love that I can keep my pen and pencil handy
for immediate use:

4)  I love that I have pages and pages in which to jot any old thought that pops into my
head and that I can rewrite sentences and figure out characterization issues and vomit
out any angst and uncertainty here, and generally just have lots of room to move:

5)  But maybe most of all, I love that the back cover has a drawing by Wildebeest:

              

Friday Five: The ADD Edition

/ Tracy Abell / 11 Comments

Here’s a scary little peek into my head this morning:

1) Okay, before I do anything else I need to put that laundry in the washer
2) but wait a minute, this gift I planned on contributing to the gift exchange doesn’t meet the spending minimum
3) which reminds me I also haven’t gotten anything for my brother yet but
4) maybe there’s some cool Neil Young memorabilia on ebay I could get for him
5) oh, forget it, I can’t afford that $999 autographed guitar and plus wasn’t I supposed to finish revisions today?

Friday Five: The May Day Edition

/ Tracy Abell / 15 Comments

Last night when Zippy reminded me today is May Day
the first thought in my head was a plane going down
and a pilot screaming "Mayday, mayday, mayday" into a radio.

This morning’s exhaustive (ahem) research revealed:

Mayday is, indeed, the international code word for distress
and is derived from the French venez m’aider
which means "come help me."

(Now that we’ve cleared that up…)

In much of the world and some regions of the U.S., May Day
is synonymous with the labor movement
celebrating workers’ rights and achievements.

May Day as a celebration of spring and fertility
isn’t as widely celebrated in the U.S. as other parts of the world
mainly because the Puritans were opposed to it.
Possibly because it involved . . .

Pole dancing.

But you’re in luck if you’d rather not celebrate with the May Day Dance.
Instead, you can make a May Basket and fill it with treats and flowers
then place it on a doorstep, ring the bell, and run away.
You should know, however, that the person receiving the basket might chase you
and if that person catches you, you have to share a kiss.
So consider yourself warned and gift accordingly.

Happy May Day, everyone! 
                              

Friday Feel-Goods

/ Tracy Abell / 29 Comments

1)  Yesterday I sent a letter to the editor in support of paper ballots and hand-counts.  Today the Denver Post published my letter but edited out several key sentences (my letter was over the word count).  I called the letters editor to let him know I was unhappy with what he cut and that I would’ve preferred cutting the letter myself.  He offered his direct email address for submitting future letters and said he’d let me see edits before publishing my letters.  Then a couple minutes later I received an email from him letting me know that he’d restored my letter in its entirety for the newspaper’s online version.  Plus he let me know he’d like more letters from me regarding verifiable voting because it was an important issue, one of great concern to the Post.  I’m so glad I took the time to call.

2)  Today is sunny and warm.  For the first time in forever, I’m going out on the trails to run.  It might be muddy in places but I’m willing to risk running in 15-pound shoes just to get off the streets and into the open space.

3)  Revisions are moving slowly on my middle-grade but I’m making progress.  I’ve read the opening pages about a billion times and whenever I read a certain line on page four, I crack up.  I might be the only one who thinks it’s funny but for the time being, I consider it a good sign.

4)  My shoulder and back muscles are sore because last night I did circuit training for the first time in about three weeks.  Sore is good because it reminds me I did all those push-ups.

5)  Wildebeest wasn’t turning in assignments so now has to have a weekly progress report signed by all teachers.  Last night he checked the online portal to make sure he had everything done but discovered a science assignment incorrectly marked “missing.”  He immediately wrote a note to himself and stapled it to the blank progress report so he’d remember to straighten out the no-name mix-up with his teacher.  Believe me, that’s a big WOW coming from him.

Here’s wishing lots of feel-good moments for everyone this weekend.

                 

Friday Five

/ Tracy Abell / 26 Comments

I’ve never done one of these posts but

1)  since my head continues to feel like a mucus-filled sponge

2)  and I still can’t concentrate on my WIP despite the appalling lack of progress because of the aforementioned mucus

3)  not to mention the fact that the refurbished Dell laptop I bought eight months ago on ebay died a quiet death on Wednesday

4)  which, by the way, is starting to feel like a sign from the universe to cut out my time-wasting Solitaire addiction already,

5)  I’m stopping by to wish everyone a wonderful weekend complete with clear lungs and pristine nasal passages.