Friday, December 03, 2004
On Holidays, Blogs, and [gasp!] even Writing
Thanksgiving was nice, although I got a little homesick. When I was growing up, Thanksgiving was a day spent with family and friends -- and we didn't always know who the friends would be as it always kind of depended on circumstance. The day was about family and community and sharing and warmth - and it was fun. Missing out on spending that time with my family is more difficult than it might seem. Fortunately, I was "adopted" into a family for the day, and then I spent the rest of the weekend in Ohio with some of my closest friends. What great reminders that folks hold me in their hearts as closely as I hold them in mine.
I finished knitting two scarves and started a third. Christmas presents, don't ya know.
I also ended up at the doctor's, where I was diagnosed with a sinus infection. After that, I was feeling OK until Tuesday afternoon. All I could think about was how much I wanted to go home and curl up in bed under the blankets.
Elaine Cunningham has replaced her first blog with a new one, Elven Bard. An excellent post about "reading up" caused me to cringe a little bit at what's on my current reading list. There's nothing like an advanced degree in literature to suck the enjoyment right out of the act of reading. After years - even, one could say, decades - of splitting my reading time between the two diametrically opposed camps of Great Works of Literature and Literary Theory and Criticism and genre fiction, these days I sometimes find it difficult to pick up something to read that isn't... well, mostly schlocky genre fiction. The stuff of guilty pleasures. I appreciate Elaine's recommendation of Robin McKinley's Sunshine. I like this author's work a lot. Maybe this will be a good book to read to start adding a little more richness to my reading diet.
In the last post she made in the now defunct blog, Elaine addressed professionalism. She said it much more eloquently, but the basic idea was about thinking of yourself as a professional, treating yourself as a professional, and managing your work time as a professional are key habits to develop in order to be professional. Yet as a writer working from the home (or working full-time at a job that pays the bills and part-time at writing), it can be easy to treat one's self, one's writing, and one's time less than professionally because so many other things and other people (and other cats, of course) demand your attention. That really spoke to me. I sense a New Year's resolution coming on....
I finished knitting two scarves and started a third. Christmas presents, don't ya know.
I also ended up at the doctor's, where I was diagnosed with a sinus infection. After that, I was feeling OK until Tuesday afternoon. All I could think about was how much I wanted to go home and curl up in bed under the blankets.
Elaine Cunningham has replaced her first blog with a new one, Elven Bard. An excellent post about "reading up" caused me to cringe a little bit at what's on my current reading list. There's nothing like an advanced degree in literature to suck the enjoyment right out of the act of reading. After years - even, one could say, decades - of splitting my reading time between the two diametrically opposed camps of Great Works of Literature and Literary Theory and Criticism and genre fiction, these days I sometimes find it difficult to pick up something to read that isn't... well, mostly schlocky genre fiction. The stuff of guilty pleasures. I appreciate Elaine's recommendation of Robin McKinley's Sunshine. I like this author's work a lot. Maybe this will be a good book to read to start adding a little more richness to my reading diet.
In the last post she made in the now defunct blog, Elaine addressed professionalism. She said it much more eloquently, but the basic idea was about thinking of yourself as a professional, treating yourself as a professional, and managing your work time as a professional are key habits to develop in order to be professional. Yet as a writer working from the home (or working full-time at a job that pays the bills and part-time at writing), it can be easy to treat one's self, one's writing, and one's time less than professionally because so many other things and other people (and other cats, of course) demand your attention. That really spoke to me. I sense a New Year's resolution coming on....
