Admiral with wings closed...his bright pretty stuff is on the inside, but I think love the subtle patterns on the outside of the wings more...
Two Tiger Swallowtails...It's so hard to "catch" one flutterbye holding still, but two within inches of each other, tougher, man, I'm tellin' you, I was clicking the button faster than the little Fuji could keep up, I knew I'd get at least one photo of the moment worth saving...
So here is my cluttered old drafting table where I work...yup, that is paint stains on the table top from paintings made long ago...
I had the dreaded Blue Screen of Death visit my laptop last week Wednesday, and now it's back, fixed and has gained two little brothers, a Dell Mini (that I bought immediately with the little bit of money I've saved for a new computer) and a 500GB portable hard drive (thank goodness I had just gotten paid)...it could've been a virus or an error in the mechanism that tripped up the gadget...whatever, the good news is none of my writing or photos were lost (most everything was backed up), tho' my email and address book is gone, bookmarks missing, which is very annoying, all necessary software is reloaded...I'm heading back toward normal operations. Tho' I'm still cringing every time I turn it on now...if I happen to be not listening for it and miss the Windows start-up chime, I become concerned...that will wear off eventually...
Live and learn...always...
Writing a book and putting it out for people to read is one of those major 'live and learn' lessons...I updated my Q&A at Goodreads this morning, and added another excerpt from The Fractured Hues of White Light for readers to browse...after I pasted the piece into place, I noticed the word 'mediations' on page 66 ...dang, darn, drat and damn! Did I use the wrong word? I think I meant to say "meditations", but suddenly I'm not sure. I'll tell you now, it's been that way for years, as soon as I found it, I dug into the archives and found it consistently written as 'mediations' all along! ARRRGH! But in my mind, today, I read it as 'meditations' and now I'm second guessing myself. How does one miss that? Easy, the mind fills in what isn't there while you're reading along, no matter how careful. I'm not going to make myself nuts about it (tho' I know I will because that's how I am, I am totally obsessing about it that's why I'm writing about it.) Just in case I'm wrong about what I meant to say, I've marked it for changes later with a post-it note tucked in my proof copy, I'm sure I'll find more changes to make and it will be better to do it all at once rather than piece meal changes that wind up costing money and time. No matter how careful I am, I still miss stuff...and this was proofread by another pair of eyes too, so she could've caught it way back during that early draft. Good grief. I suppose in some in context, it works, Sylvester could be 'mediating' within himself (relaxing mediations) while he was fly-fishing in the stream and thinking about the stuff bugging him, but no, I think I meant 'relaxing meditations' because he was trying to find a zone of comfort within himself. Ah, well, nobody's perfect. Well, I'm in good company, there are books published by the best and biggest publishing houses with grammatical slip-ups and wrong words and they have paid editors working on it (usually very overworked and also very human), so I shouldn't be kicking myself for being sloppy... but I tend to hold the bar for myself higher than most...it's just the way I am (If my name's on it, I want it to be right!) I know toward the end of the process I was becoming a bit cross-eyed from looking at it for so long. I'm not overly anxious to proofread it again right away...but I know I will be picking it up sooner rather than later...I heard about this website called I Write Like (http://iwl.me/) in which you paste a sample of your writing and it compares your writing to samples of the famous in their database (tho' I'm sure it's limited)...so for the heck of it, I tucked in a small sample from chapter 1 of Dusty Waters (it was a dark and stormy night last night, so it was a fun thing to do) and it came up that I write like Nabokov... I'm not sure what to think of that...it's good, but a little intimidating...I can see this being a time wasting sort of thing...probably addicting...so I stopped at that and probably won't go back...it might say I write like Stephen King next...not that there's anything wrong with that...
I'm glad to have my laptop back, and I'm glad to be working on my blogs again...last weekend I was so out of sorts...
