Revision: the painful art of starting over.....

Join me in the scary place writers call  revision.........something I will be teaching writers in a few months. 

Revision is like walking through cactus.... 

in the dark...barefoot and trying to read a map that you no longer trust.......

Or like trying to capture the moon on a windy night with a shaky camera.....knowing that it will never work.

NEVER EVER....

Or like deciding to lean out a window and  take a picture of a beautiful old building even though you know it will never fit anywhere  in the work you are trying to improve and shorten and  see anew....but you do it because you tell yourself that the building will be part of the thing that you will write AFTER the thing you are revising now is finished..and taking pics is WAY easier than actually revising or even thinking about revising....

Or you could try hiding. 

It doesn't work, but you can TRY....
((and I need to get to work on my own revision now))

WIND IN THE TREES : A progress report.

Wind in the trees: My perfect writing weather.....

I am close to sending my agent the first 80 or so pages of The Maker's Cage. I think it is one of the best things I have ever written. It's one of the oddest....

Then I will be back in Limori almost full-time.  And by "almost" I mean I will continue what I am doing now. ..I will only be leaving Limori  when I can't see or hear any of the Limori characters that day..... 

Wind in the trees ::  I can always see their faces.

...but when those days come...
Russett will be the new secondary project.
(I said that very quietly. I don't want to scare him away...

...I would hate to have him think I might betray him. I won't. I have seen the places  he escaped and the scars on his hands.

missing the target, a writer's best friend

I will go to work in a few minutes...this whole post is a warm-up.

I love bad pictures (like all of these)  because I can't always remember where I took them or why or even  what the image IS.

This one might have been a back-bend sky shot taken somewhere at a writer's conference EARLY in the morning when I was running to get to the room before the attendees started to arrive because....I just like to have a little time to try to convince myself that I am qualified to teach writing.

This one is in the Florida
Everglades, I was with a friend after all the teaching and writer talk was done for the day. The funny part is I was trying to get picture of the white bird before it flew away

...trying so hard that I didn't use the zoom lens and ended up with two skies instead.

This one is in Morocco  and I am not sure how I screwed up and blurred the shot but I was looking out over the city from the high ridge that is casting the sunrise shadow before I visited classrooms, then spoke to young teachers.

And  last........... no clue where or what this is, but it's how I imagined the crowds below the Limori cliffs last night. Angry and scared.

and........

This is our dog's answer to thermal precision. She is very picky about her temperature ranges and spends a lot of her time listening to me clicking keys and talking aloud to people no one else can see.... yet.

The Unicorn's Secret and me.

I wrote these books years ago because I wanted to share the amazing dreams I had in 3rd and 4th grade. For almost two years I would get into bed each night, close my eyes and become the girl named Heart. Her adventures, her long journey home, was my journey, too. Every night I was Heart. Every morning I went to sleep in the dream, then immediately woke up in my own bed, with my mother telling me it was time to get ready for school

...I talked about the books on FB the other day and was amazed at how many people still love them, people of all ages who had shared them with their parents, children and grand children. Amazon carries them and any bookstore can get them. Simon & Schuster is the publisher. May all your dreams be amazing!