Sorrow

In memory of the Sandy Hook Elementary School angels.

Lord, comfort the parents.

I did it!

Frustration X ?

I must post more on this blog. It'd been so long I couldn't remember sign in details and have just been going round and round with Blogger!!!  Think I got it straight now. Maybe.

This year I decided to participate in the November Novel Writing Month in which writers strive to get 50000 words written in 30 days. And I wanted to add a Nanowrimo link to my word count. so now I've wasted a couple hours when I could have been adding WORDS to my total! Arrrgggg!

So here it is, I hope.
Sylvia/Nanowrimo

2012 Symposium

The fourth Appalachian Heritage Writers Symposium is finished. Again it was hosted on the campus of Southwest Virginia Community College near Richlands, Virginia. This one was as good or better than the three previous conferences, in my opinion. Presenters delivered excellent sessions on fiction and nonfiction, children's literature, use of paranormal elements, poetry, illustration and internet presence. In addition a different setup of three mini workshops on Saturday morning culminated in two open mic sections. Participants delivered a variety of examples of their work. Any writer who was unable to make it this year should save the dates, June 14-15, 2013, and plan to attend the Symposium.
Sponsors of the Symposium included a number of individuals, SWCC Foundation, Appalachian Authors Guild, Virginia Writers Club, Lost State Writers Guild, Dominion Resources and Barter Theater among others, in addition to a small writing contest entry fee. 

Year half gone

Not a lot accomplished, at least not as much as I'd like. Have kept Guild's webpages updated pretty regularly and presented a program at the Lost State Writers Guild May meeting on 'Make That Scene'. Enough Life Slices columns written and sent in that I only missed a week being published since January. And I thought I had enough notes and ideas stacked around and filed that I'd have no problem getting the columns written. Hah. Not every idea I scribbled down is column potential. Around three hundred words is my goal and you really have to focus to get a coherent piece done without extraneous words. Not that I'm always successful. I cringe when I read a couple. If any possible reader of this blog has not read my columns, either in a print issue or online at the Kingsport Daily News, here's the link to my latest effort. Hope you like it.

Say what? March 31?

Three months of 2012 gone already? After Christmas and New Year's I kept waiting, surely winter would be upon us now. But no, barely enough snow and ice to bring the salt and chat spreaders and the ice scraping trucks out a couple of times. Safer for the drivers of those vehicles, as well as us so-called normal drivers, no doubt. Still - pretty red Japonica blooms hardly waited for February and February was barely past when jonquils, hyacinths, Bradford pears and crocus burst on the scene. Crocus, I understand. We've all seen them poking through the snow in other more normal Februarys. Now it's the last day of March and those white Bradford pear and yellow forsythia blooms are down for the count, tulips in various colors are opening up everywhere and impatient gardeners (including myself) feel they cannot wait for that elusive 'last frost' date to begin planting.

Since this is supposed to be a writing blog I suppose I'd better mention that there will be a gardening article for another website which will chronicle this my first attempt at raised bed gardening. Plus I have been gathering and polishing short stories for entering contests, three away already. 

The past three months have also been busy with my version of 'spring cleaning', coding updates for writers group websites and my own websites in addition to board meetings and planning committee meetings for the Appalachian Heritage Writers Symposium.

Who has time for spring 'housecleaning?'