Thursday, 20 June 2002

My birthday gift from my brother was a t-shirt with an Esperanto haiku on the back. The very first time I wore it, at lunch on Wednesday, a woman came up to me and said, "Is your t-shirt advertising beer or Esperanto or both?"

"Esperanto," I said.

"Chu vi parolas Esperanton?" she asked.

It was quite a treat for me. It's only the second time I've spontaneously met another Esperantist (not counting the times when I'm attending an organized Esperanto convention).

I bought a digital camera. It arrived yesterday. Today after work Jackie and I went for a walk around Kaufman Lake, taking pictures.

Kaufman Lake is where I run most often, especially early in the season when I don't run very far.

I'm very pleased with the quality of the pictures our new camera produces. It's only a 2 megapixel camera, but I don't expect to print very many pictures. If all I'm going to do is put them up on a web page, I figure that's all I really need.

Another birthday present was Creating Short Fiction by Damon Knight. I've been reading it very thoughtfully. One thing it talks about is writing stories that mean something. There's where my stories tend to fall down. I think it might be part of the reason I've written so little lately (aside from just generally being busy). I need to write stories that matter. If they don't matter, at least to me, they're not worth the trouble to write.

I learned so much last year about structuring stories, I think I started trying to assemble stories from pieces (an idea, a character with a problem, some obstacles to solving it...). That's a big waste of time. Hopefully, I've got that out of my system now. There are things that matter to me, stories that I want to tell.