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Thanks for reading and responding to my poem! You are indeed correct, winter seems to me a slowing of time, a stillness in our lives. The visual for the poem was my dog, slowly moving around the frozen yard, crunching with every deliberate step in the stillness of twilight before the sun peaked. I watched him move around in this manner as I sat drinking coffee and waiting for the big orange ball to arrive.
I have researched some OCR tech, much of it is costly. I did figure out once how to transition a TIFF to PDF using a Google Drive to Google Docs method, but the output was so bad it was of no use. For any given project, I download the archive files, all of them being images and not documents, and then I make my way through each one, page by page, with the goal of determining what happened and why the documents were classified to begin with. It's a lot of fun for me, but it is very tedious work and it takes a long time to discover the story behind the document.
Thanks again for the interaction.
I love the time dedicated to your son. Not only for his education, but the time spent is priceless and will be something he will never forget. The joy you received from investing that time is like getting paid twice for the same work. Love it.
My first wins today, and every day, are the hugs I get from my kids as they wake up and come downstairs. I'm usually up early, sitting in my chair with a cup of coffee and reading. I still have five kids in the house, and they all wake up at different times. But when they shuffle downstairs with sleep still painted on their faces and find me sitting in my chair, my great joy of the day is the hug I get before they go eat breakfast.
After that, the rest of the day is just details.
Thanks so much for reading. I'm excited for the summaries, but I'm anxious since I've never done streaming anything. I'll work it out though.
Ha! My grass struggles even when it's not winter thanks to the kids and the pets. Thanks for welcoming me.
That’s a great question, and I don’t really know if I have done so on purpose.
I’ve written plenty characters that were just boring and flat. They were like cardboard cutouts, in that they looked like characters but they had no depth. And when I first started writing years ago, I just couldn’t figure out why my story wasn’t moving forward. I thought the plot was wrong, or even that my ideas for the story weren’t worth writing down.
In 2019, I attended a fiction workshop with other writers, and I realized that the characters I was writing were a big part of my problem. A YA fantasy writer named Kirk interrogated my characters and wanted to know about who they really were.
After just a few questions, I realized what he was trying to teach me: if I wanted to write realistic characters, then they had to be real. If they weren’t real to me, then they wouldn’t be real to the reader either.
Honestly, that workshop was more way than worth the few hundred dollars that it cost. It taught me something so simple that it’s almost stupid–Without characters you don’t have a story, and without real characters you won’t have readers.
There are many ways flesh out characters, like the sheets someone else mentioned earlier in this thread. And the great part is that they can be whoever you want them to be. I just focus on the “grit” because that helps keep me grounded. Otherwise, my characters would likely all be superheroes with no flaws and perfect lives, and that just sounds abysmal!
I love thoughts like this!
Whenever I envision a character for a story, I like to focus on their grit, the stuff that makes them real. It is that grittiness, from the trenches of their lives, the unexpected strengths, that makes this imaginary person real and tangible.
Throughout my life as a soldier, or a diesel mechanic, or a salesman, or writer, I have encountered many real people who have real strengths, real weaknesses, and a profound sense of dedication to something in life.
Grit is that eclectic mixture of our flawed dedication to some aspect of life and that irreducible drive to accomplish an otherwise unimportant goal or task.
Grit is the guy going through a divorce who repairs engines on fire trucks as he silently suffers through cancer because he doesn’t want his ten-year-old daughter to worry or think him weak.
Grit is the overweight, introverted salesman who makes up for a low self esteem by becoming the best salesman in the company, just so he can prove to his father that he’s not a failure in life.
Grit is the young adult addicted to pornography who longs so much for human intimacy that suicide is a daily threat.
For my characters, grit is just the stuff that makes them real and relatable, highlighting their struggles even when they succeed.
Grit is the real humanity behind the facade of perfection we often portray to strangers. If anything, I want my characters to have grit so the reader can instantly connect and live through them and their story.
Thanks for sharing! These types of writing experiments are always rewarding to me.
Thanks for your insights!
I really enjoyed Habla earlier this year. I published one long form piece in February about discovering bitcoin, but I haven’t been able to publish any thing on that platform lately.
When I log in and click on the “Write” button, it brings me to a page that says the feature I selected is “coming soon”. So, I’m not sure what’s going on there, but I would love to use Habla again.
I like your idea about sending my nostr generated content into the other social media platforms! Right now, I publish articles and poems on Wordpress and then forward them to those same social media platforms, and then also to nostr.
I am certainly trying to flip all of that around and create from nostr. Thanks for your time!
Thanks for the guidance!
Someone earlier today mention "kind" posts. Is there a way to select between kind1 and kind23, or does it just kind of happen?
That's a good question. Some days are better than others, that's for sure.
It helps that I work from home as a freelance writer, so I'm not out and about all day working at an actual job. I also homeschool my kids, though, so that does take some time.
I do stay up until well after midnight most nights, and that's when I do most of my writing, either creatively or for clients. But a huge part of the writing process is reading other people's work, so I always read something new everyday.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean, but I must clarify that I've read most of the Kindle books on my reader. When a friend announces the publication of a book, I usually buy it and read it right away.
I did not mean to imply that the Kindle books were also on my to-be-read list, but I see how that sounds now.
While they don't always ask for my opinion, we are very open about what we think. Some of us went through our MFAs together, so we have pretty thick skin! But honesty is always the most appreciated approach.
For instance, if anyone reads my poem and tells me they don't like it, or they didn't appreciate it, I'm still happy that they read and interacted with it.
I'm not sure of that addressed your question correctly.
I still read more paper books than ebooks. My to-read pile will take me a decade to get through, but I'm making my way through it.
I'm currently reading two paper books:
"Pity the Reader" by Kurt Vonnegut
"All Art is Propaganda" by George Orwell
To be fair, I also have a couple hundred Kindle books. Some of my fellow poets and writers only publish on KDP, so that's the only way I can support them.
Hey! Thanks for the welcome and the shout out! And I am ever so grateful to everyone who read my work.
I have more coming as I transition to nostr. I've written poetry for years, and I have a lot of it online. But as I have recently come to Bitcoin, I am reorienting myself to this community.
I look forward to supporting you all, and I thank you for your support.
You're right. I could make new versions of each poem as I migrate them to nostr. I actually believe that poems are never done being written until the poet dies.
When I first started writing poetry, I sought out other poets, and one of my mentors told me that before. He said that a poem written in my 20s, will be different than the same poem I write in my 30s. And as the poet revises each poem to reflect the changes within the poet, this process is ongoing and only ends when the poet is no longer around to make the changes.