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.

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Always looking...

Hollyhock stalk with seed buds, 12/11/2010
Snowdrift, 12/11/2010
 I'm a bit sick of the snow...it's blowing and raining today, tomorrow there will be more snow after this current mess passes by and triggers more lake effect snow, pretty much the same weather set up as last week (oh, joy.)

My yard has been invaded by a flock of starlings wearing their winter speckles, I love hearing their chatter!

My dog is dreaming, and barking in his sleep.

Thought I'd throw in some pictures I took last week of an old door...






 

 I'm a sucker for old weather beaten wood...I love the shapes, the colors, and textures of this door...and it's got the character scratches left behind by an eager dog begging to go out or just glad to see you coming home, sort of like a written history of someone coming home. I'm always looking for inspiration somewhere...

I've been slightly under the weather...maybe weather related, maybe just worn out, but I'm plugging along, the snow is melting, and winding up in my basement, the sump-pumps are in action taking care of that mess...it's warm enough for lady bugs to come out.

I've written a raw bit for my latest manuscript, Layers of Illusion...my main character, Eleanor spoke up last night and started a rant about television, so I had to listen to her and write it down...so here it is, warts n' all...

*

The television makes me uneasy—everything about the little innocuous box makes me feel un-easy. Too much focus on fear in the news—the world is being overrun by terrorists in turbans (but it seems we have enough of our home-grown variety to worry about), in politics, the Republicans are the Party of Boo! The old fear mongers are constantly being grim-faced negative about everything under the sun that might possibly be good for the people, the bastards. You gotta love how manufactured anger has permeated our society; human disasters implode in our faces every day. Natural disasters seem to be everywhere (they used to be a rare thing when I was a kid), good grief, I never heard of a tsunami until Indonesia got slammed, and now it seems there are tsunami’s (or the potential of one) all the time—what the hell, right? What irritates me even more—every Made for TV Movie is exploiting someone’s unfortunate tragedy for the entertainment of us! Someone is always in trouble, chronically; someone always getting hurt, badly; someone always getting ripped off, incessantly; someone always getting killed, senselessly. Anything brought forth that is positive is so over the top saccharine I could cry my eyeballs out. Yes—I cry at the drop of a hat these days—especially around the holidays, even the commercials are on the tear-jerker setting at full blast. Initially, I was blaming it on hormones, but now, no, I’ve come to realize that I've been marketed to distraction by a media that is bludgeoning my emotions every time I turn on the television. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I unplugged the fucking thing, hauled it into the hallway outside my apartment with the hope that someone will take it. From that moment on I vowed that I will rely on NPR to give me the news reports with their kind, level-headed voices that drone at a volume that is set to relax—sure the world is going to hell in a hand basket, but wait, there is still hope for something better. Hope, I need a good dose of that for my frazzled nerves, I could listen to that shit forever—sure beats the hopeless drumbeat on television. Sometimes I don’t get out of my car right away when I get home at night, I want to finish listening to the story they’re talking about, and then the next one, and then the next. No matter how bad the news is, there is a gentle hum of hope. At least I don't feel like banging my head against the wall or becoming a ranting lunatic toting a gun for a no good reason.

No one took the stupid television until I dragged it out to the common area by the elevators and taped a sign on it FREE! It sat there for a couple of days before it finally disappeared. I don't miss it, not one bit.

*

Eleanor Dean is still developing...growing. Her circumstances keep evolving in that mysterious way of writing a book, the road map is a twisty route from beginning to end, lots of stuff in the middle, some of it will stay, some of it will go the way of things...who knows if this latest piece will make it. She's a woman teetering on the edge, stuck on survive, suffering from one thing after another, being ground down by a cascading sequence of catastrophes, chucking out her television is a sign that she's trying to get a handle on her life. I'm letting the ideas simmer quietly, this has been going on for about 9-10 years, I have gathered at least 200 pages of bits and pieces like this (if not more), one day, I will print it all out, get my scissors and tape, and start piecing it together to create the whole. Goodness knows if it will actually become a book...I do have my doubts about it...but that's part of the process, and I'm okay with it.

Time.


1 comment:

helen said...

Like all the photos - especially of the old doors!