Welcome to my blog Upstate Girl, (a.k.a Follow Your Bliss Part II), I am an independently published author. This blog is all about writing and the stuff that inspires me to write, the joys and obstacles that come along with the writer's life, and my fascination with the psychology of people and what makes them tick...the human condition, as is...and my love for words, playing with them and making sense of them...and I throw in a few photos from my acre of the world just to make things pretty...sometimes there are things I have no words for, only pictures will do.

*Copyright notice* All photos, writing, and artwork are mine (
© Laura J. Wellner), unless otherwise noted, please be a peach, if you'd like to use my work for a project or you just love it and must have it, message me and we'll work out the details...it's simple...JUST ASK, please.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

This and that, and more...

Another Thanksgiving has come and gone, I'm recovering from the preparation before and the day itself...lots of family, lots of food (I've been known to whip up a Thanksgiving dinner storm that is quite heavenly! But it's always amusing to me that after it's all done and on the table, I don't want any of it...hello, anyone ready to order some Chinese? Go figure.

While cleaning my house, I always wash off my collections of stones that I have around the house...the little kids are always fascinated by them...Great Aunt Laura is weird you know...she collects lots of strange old things and has then lying about in bowls and on tables...these were in a bowl on the dinner table...

The day before the day of our feast, we were visited by a rainbow...
Always a good omen...the day itself was above average good weather, lovely, mild...and then it snowed overnight...so yesterday morning, I tromped around in the winter wonderland and enjoyed the sights...and took lots of pictures...

The mist...

Peering up through the branches of my favorite gnarly maple tree...


A patient little peep in the tree...my feeder is visited daily by a variety of birds and furry critters, but the gold finch flock is quite sweet...

Snow and tree branches...I love black and white...

While I wait for my first proof of The Fractured Hues of White Light to come into being, I've started to read my next offering for Field Stone Press, Drinking from the Fishbowl...I read through the first eight pages yesterday, but I was still in too much of an exhausted state from the day before to really comprehend what I was reading...and I have to admit that my work on White Light really took a lot out of me after all those weeks working on it, and having Sammy, Sylvester, Guthrie, and Helena in my head clamoring about their concerns, it wasn't so easy to step into Georgia Sullivan's world...so today I back-tracked...yes, it's just as I remember it...I haven't seen it since October of 2008, so it's good to visit it again and to see that my hard work last year made it a strong piece...reading Georgia's poetic musings always makes me think about my poems that I have left aside for many years...maybe one day I will return to their simple pleasures...tho' I'm sure that they're not as wonderful as I had once thought (I cringe to think)...Georgia herself is a delight, a young woman with a mind full of beauty and hope...I love her naivete in spite of her book learning, she's the perfect innocent...so when Professor Mortensen Boyd asked her why she wanted to be a poet, she stumbled...she never thought about the why, but "this is what I want to do" and "this is what I've done" have been her focus...from there I take her beyond the dream to harsh reality, and then return her to the dream and the hope...it's quite the journey...I can't wait to get on with it...

With that said...I'll leave you with the other end of the rainbow...

4 comments:

Four Seasons in a Life said...

Like you I love Thanksgiving and I do not mind spending days getting ready and doing all the cooking, including the cleaning up. However once we enter into Friday, the day after, I wish we could just speed up to January 2 as quickly as possible and begin with looking forward to spring.

I once liked Christmas and would spend 4-5 days decorating the house and tree, but the commercialization has ruined it for me. Sorry, but that is what it is.

Now I am in recovery mood . . .


Wishing you a grand Sunday and a smashing start tot he week,
Egmont

Caterina Giglio said...

your photos are magnificent. I love black and white too and you have truly captured it! visually chewy!

Gwen Buchanan said...

Laura, you have shared Nature and all its Beauty...
especially the wee bird in the snow covered branches... the warmth and the cold...

Pat said...

As always your photos are amazing, making me really want to improve.
You make me think that allthat you and all other writers write are autobiographical. Is that only a whim of mine that the book allows me entrance to a person's personality?