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I don’t know what this thing was, but it was running down the road headed for a construction site near where I work. It was awesomely large, like a giant wheeled mammoth or something. I think I would have liked for it to have fangs or claws or something.
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We were doing “Word Wars” during the NaNo write-in the other day, which is where you challenge another writer or writers to write as quickly as possible for a determined period of time. Each time I did a word war I wrote my original word count on my cup, and then when I was done I did the math, subtracting from the old total to get the number of words added. As you can see, I did a number of word wars. This is how one gets two thousand words written in an hour – a series of ten-minute and five-minute sprints.
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Got together with some of my WriMo friends today for a write-in. We had a good group. I think all told we had about a dozen people show up throughout the afternoon. Many words written at those tables that day!
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On my way to work this morning and got held up by some kind of construction…which actually turned out to be that there was some sort of massive water leak below the surface of the street, and it seemed to have pushed the surface of the road up a good six inches! If you look around the guy’s feet, you can see water bubbling up from underneath the cracks in the asphalt. Craziness. It was fixed the next day.
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I was all set to do another post on NaNo tonight, and on my way back home from the coffee shop I spied this ’58 Impala just hangin’ out in an alley. It was dark, I had no tripod, and it came out just a *wee* bit shaky, but I posted it anyway, because it’s just so damn cool. You should expect this sort of behavior from me by now, I imagine.
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Doesn’t take much to make me happy. A few free hours with the laptop, a latte, and some kind of bran/granola/fabola/roll-a.
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My friend, Will Scott, is a full-time musician living in New York. He was doing a tour into the Midwest recently, and I was lucky enough to be able to make it to the show. He’s an amazing live performer, drawing on a number of diverse influences such as blues, gospel, country and roots rock. He kind of reminds me of a mix of Chris Whitley, Tom Waits, and Son House. I had a blast, took tons of pictures, and in general just enjoyed the hell out of myself. Sometimes it really is nice to be mixing this photography thing in with other stuff that I dig so much. If you like to check out new music, go look him up and listen to his new album at http://willscottmusic.com/home.html .
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The Artist’s Way talks about “touchstones.” These are images or objects that kind of draw out our good feelings about creativity, kind of create a comfortable surrounding for it to let itself go, help encourage creative thought and play. I love collections of images as displayed in this magazine article on the drag racing history of ’55-’57 Chevrolets, then there’s some art that my friend and I have done, and a couple of books that I really enjoy. It’s nice to notice these sorts of things when I’m in the middle of this hectic month of novel writing. These things spark the mind, give it energy, and just kind of make a person (well, this person) go, “Man, that’s so cool. I want to make something!” and then you go off and do just that.
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I don’t think I need to say anything on this one.
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This project was gifted to me by a teenage girl whom I don’t even know. I was hanging out with my friends, and she was at a table nearby coloring. She had some colored pencils, so it shouldn’t surprise you that I went over to look. She showed me what she was doing and said, “Here, there’s a web site you can print them out from. You can have this one,” and she gave me one that she had printed out already. I’ve been working on it little by little, just kind of more practice for arranging colors. If you need something for yourself or your kids to goof around with, the web site on the paper says www.geometrip.com, and you can go there and print out stuff like this for fun. It’s kind of a cool blending of math and visual art. There are tons of designs and some of the examples are really gorgeous!
Edit: A friend of mine saw me working on this and said, “That looks like something my wife does. She calls them ‘mandalas,’ and coloring them can be a sort of meditation process.” I thought that was interesting as all get-out, so I looked them up, and, damn, if those things aren’t ever cool! There’s some really great information on mandalas here, if you’re interested.