Daily Sacrament Contest Winners

Relief Journal announced the winner of the Daily Sacrament contest. Don Hosel was the winner and fellow Misfit Angie Poole was the runner up. Both stories will be published in issue three of Relief which you can order by clicking on the picture to the right. Having read Angie's terrific story I knew it had a great chance to be in contention. I'm looking forward to reading Don's story. I liked his story last year for the Faith in Fiction conversion contest.

Congratulations to you both.

Charlie the Conehead

This is our dog Charlie with his conehead. He got it off Friday and was very happy. However the vet was not so happy with him. He had dislodged the drain that was supposed to be in his ear. It was sutured in and somehow Charlie had gotten it out, despite the cone. It seems like ripping out something that was sewn it would be painful. But he doesn't look too unhappy, does he?

This was Charlie's second surgery on his ears. Part of the problem is because he's a lab and they have floppy ears so the air doesn't get in there and dry things out. But Charlie is worse because he has allergies. He's allergic to everything. He has to have a special pet food with no animal protein in it. No dog bones for him. He gets apples and pears and ice cubes to chew on. When Charlie's allergies act up he scratches and rubs his ears in the lawn, thus creating hematomas (giant bruises) and getting cuts and dirt and debris in there. So I have to bathe him weekly and clean his ears out twice a week, plus put in antibiotics. This last time, his hemotoma got big enough he had to have it surgically removed. Except that he had too much scar tissue from the last surgery so the doctor could only put in the drain to siphon off the fluid. Which Charlie managed to take out somehow.

This picture might give you an idea of how he does that. He runs across the lawn and dives head first into the grass, twisting until his ears hit the grass and he forces the cone back. He went through two cones in three weeks, both of which I ended up duct taping to hold them together.

It's a good thing he's cute. And happy.

Long Time No Post

Sorry I've been letting my blog get dusty. I was trying to get my entry done for the Genesis contest of ACFW.

Also, our dog, Charlie, had surgery on his ear and has a conehead now. I should post some pictures of him.

And I got my Mac almost fully restored. I was so happy to get my pictures back, especially the ones from our trip to Chicago and Indiana.

I particularly liked this picture I took of leaves frozen in Michelle's pond.

Finally, when I converted my blog to the new Blogger version, it lost one of my RSS feeds. The one with the most subscribers. So, if you were one of them, you'll need to resubscribe to the other feed.

I'll try to be a better blogger, but no promises.

Ah, a Good April 1 Press Release

Google announced via press release new, self-installed, plumbing-based Internet access called Dark Porcelain. Hey, it can't be any worse than my DSL.

I think that's going up there as one of my favorites, along with the Liberty Taco Bell.

Credit to Mir for the link.

Happy April Fools!

While I’d love to play some sort of April Fool’s Joke on you all, I don’t have the brain power. However, if someone has a good one to relate, from this year or years past, please tell us about it in the comment.

I did get my Mac back. It now has a new hard drive. And I have the arduous task of sticking all the stuff back on it. But I’ve been busy with a couple of writing projects, namely a novella proposal I was asked to be part of and getting one of my novels ready for the Genesis. And since the restore process is time consuming and doesn’t allow any other applications to be open while it’s running, I have to wait until I’m not working on something to start restoring. Sigh.

On another topic, I ran across this article by Neil Gaiman in my RWA eNotes. In it he talks about the question he gets asked the most: where do your ideas come from? It’s a great short discussion on the creative process and makes the point that ideas aren’t really what make a book. Something writers get but normals don’t.

Also I was gratified to see he had the same experience in his child’s classroom that I did in my daughter’s last year.

But then there was this awesome quote near the end of the article.

My idea of hell is a blank sheet of paper. Or a blank screen. And me, staring at it, unable to think of a single thing worth saying, a single character that people could believe in, a single story that hasn't been told before.

Staring at a blank sheet of paper.

Forever.

Reminds me of Mike Snyder’s post at the Master’s Artist last Thursday.

Which was kind of timely for me because for the novella project I was given a location, a date, and a character. That was it. And I had two weeks to come up with a synopsis and a first chapter. It was a new experience for me. And because I like to plan and plot before I write, it was pretty scary to just write. But I came to the same conclusion Gaiman did: the ideas are there and I don't have to worry about running out of them. That was pretty freeing.