If you’re reading this post, chances are, you’ve just visited my website for the first time.  And chances are (well, okay, to be certain)–I’d love to hear from you.

Crack a smile!  Stay a while!  Leave a comment.  Enjoy the ramblings up to this point, and try to get “What’s the Name of that Song?” out of your head. (Scroll down.  When you see Sesame Street, you’re one click away.)

I hope you’ll come back!  There may be contest announcements, book recommendations, writing ruminations, and perhaps even some interviews with writers.  I will also try to make good on the motto I created, “Occasional love songs to pickles or cake.”

If you would like to nominate a cake or pickle worthy of a love song, you can do so in the comments.  Or you can just say Hi.

Hi!  Thanks for stopping by!

The article was about how the content of Sesame Street has always been driven by research, but I clicked on the “What’s the Name of that Song?” video and fell so in love that I stopped reading article mid-stream to write this post. 

The adults on Sesame were so cute!  I had never realized it before.  David and Bob actually kind of wish they were doing musical theatre, but Gordan and Susan really seem happy there on Sesame Street.  And while people make a lot out of the fact that the Sesame cast is multi-racial (as well as, of course, multi-species), I think it’s also appealing that some of the adults are single, some are married, and they all hang out together.  (When I was a Sesame viewer, adults came in two kinds: married parents and single teachers.  Even if they were ‘Mrs,’ everybody knew they slept in the classroom.)

Another random Sesame factoid: since I seem to have a compulsion for admitting random ignorance (for example, the whole ‘wait–bees have feet?’ business, which appears on my website), I didn’t realize until a recent article about tv vampires that Count von Count was, yes, a vampire.  What?  He had a Transylvanian accent and pointy fangs, and yeah, maybe he was groovin’ on his cape, but what was Herry Monster?  Or Bert or Ernie, for that matter?  Was there a species of yellow oval-shaped creatures somewhere, and I just didn’t know about it?  I didn’t think so.  Similarly, I thought Count von Count was just…a Count. 

I guess it just goes to show that at young ages, kids will accept all sorts of images of normalcy.  Maybe that’s actually the point of the article about research in Sesame Street.  Guess I’ll go read it now and find out. 

Oh yeah.  And what’s the name of that song?

Hello, and welcome to the first Writerly Monday post!  Yes, it’s Tuesday (I’m not so Writerly that my head is lost in the clouds about what day it is), but hey, I did not have a blog on Monday.  I just had a writing journal.  Now that I have a blog, well, the boundaries of the world have melted, and Tuesday has become Monday, and even though there’s a very disturbing song called I Don’t Like Mondays, I do like Mondays, because I get to muse on writerliness. 

Yesterday was a very thought-provoking day in my writing, because I started to ask myself, is this too easy?  (Pause to duck while other writers throw tomatoes.)  Yes, I know that’s kind of a hideously obnoxious question, but believe me, I’m sure I will not ask it often.  In fact, if the power of the blog is really such that the boundaries of the world melt away, I may at some point try to go back in time and throw tomatoes at my own self. 

It was, though, an extraordinarily productive day.  I revised a wee bit and wrote 11 pages of what I call The Camping Book, aka The Book of the Dead.  On most days, if I’m really going great guns (a term borrowed from my slightly odd college counselor), I can write 5 pages; other days, I’ll settle for 1,000 words–roughly 2-3 pages.  (Why are we wordsmiths so numbers-obsessed sometimes?  I guess everyone has to have a goal.) Anyway, as you can see, 11 pages is kind of gnuts.  Why was I so productive? 

I’m thinking it’s because I spent the total of two weeks outlining in September, and then I dedicated a whole other slew of time to elaborating on it two weeks ago.  I got to a point where I could push myself to answer the questions, “Who should this scene belong to?  What will be the tension in this scene?  After this scene, what will we be burning to know next?” 

So hooray for outlining, as it provided me a map to guide my productive driving these last few days.  Still, though, I wonder if I’m leaving out something major that will smack me in the face when I revisit these pages.  Will I discover that, somehow, it’s really boring?  I already know I need to go back and add visual description.  I’m just going to hope that the pages are at least half as good as they were easy.  That seems like an okay kind of math, right?

Hey, kids!  So…I have this new blog!  Yahoo!

It’s in WordPress.  Everybody say it with me: worrrd presss.  I have always secretly admired those folks with WordPress blogs.  They seemed to know something I didn’t.  And, in fact, they did: how to use a WordPress blog.  So far, it doesn’t seem that hard.  I wonder what held me back. 

Yeah.  This first post isn’t brilliant so far, but there will be brilliance–brilliance, I tell you–in the future.  Really I’m just trying to generate some posts so that it doesn’t have a sad little empty little nothingness of a nothing when you come here.  But even as I wrote this, I came across a thought–a fabulous thought–that could be the subject of the next real entry.  That will blow you, away, I guarantee.

Up, up and away!