Sunday, 09 June 2002

Saturday did not go quite as planned. Jackie and I both woke up grumpy.

Neither of us tends to be grumpy, so for us both to be grumpy the same day is quite unusual.

When only one of us is grumpy it's not a big deal--the other just deals with it. We don't stay grumpy long. But when both of us are grumpy, it's more of a problem. We get started grumping back and forth at one another. That's no fun.

We did go to the Farmer's Market early as planned. But once I figured out that we were both grumpy, I suggested that we change our plans for the day and go for a long walk together.

A long walk was just what we needed. The restaurant we ended up going to for lunch wasn't far enough to make a really long walk, so we took a roundabout route, heading down McNally's alley, south on Duncan as far as the Roby trail, and all the way along the Roby trail. We took a more direct route home. The round trip was probably close to 5 miles. A good distance for grumpy people to walk.

We're not grumpy today.

I did a lot of writing today. A couple of my recent stories had scenes that were really hard to dramatize, and I solved the problem by setting the action of the story in a bar and having the character talk about what had happened. I realized, though, that I was doing the same thing in this story--but in this story there's no reason. The action is exciting in this story.

So, I rewrote it that way.

It still needs work, though. The story is about two characters. The other way had the advantage of at least putting them together early. This way we don't meet the other character until the middle. That won't work.

I'm not discouraged, though. I'll figure it out.

Hey! Hilary Moon Murphy tracked down the Clarion journalers! Here are the links she found:

• Deirdre Saoirse Moen
• Trent Walters
• Catherine Holm
• Janet Chui
• Jason Lundberg

Especially neat, they've got a web site for the Clarion 2002 class that includes links to all their journals, each marked with the date of the most recent update.