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We love our striped roses (#FOTD)
Today’s entry in Cee’s Flower of the Day photo challenge is a bud from our Rock & Roll rose. This poor thing has suffered through two moves and a ridiculous amount of neglect. We bought it in Southern California in about 2012. We dug it up in 2013 and stuffed it in a pot when we moved to Flagstaff, then planted it in our backyard, where it was abused by grasshoppers all summer and froze all winter. We eventually moved it to the front yard, where it would get more attention and better soil. Then when we moved to Tucson in 2020, we dug it up and stuffed it in…
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Pincushion cactus flower in Sabino Canyon outside Tucson, Arizona (#FOTD)
Sharing another photo from hubs’ and my attempt to hike in Sabino Canyon a week or so ago (see a few more pix from that aborted hike here). Note to self: do not hike at midday in Tucson in the summer. Sad that I have to leave myself notes about something that should be obvious to anyone with an IQ higher than a cactus, but here we are. Before we slogged back to the car to avoid heatstroke, we snapped a few pix of the local flora, including this adorable pincushion cactus. It’s just a phone pic, and taken in the bright midday sun (see aforementioned note to self), so…
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Read these 6 Books to Improve Your Fiction Writing (With a Sex-Related Bonus)
When I first started writing fiction back in 2014, I devoured books about writing. Nerdy little librarian that I am, I was sure I could learn this writing thing from a book. Or three books. Or maybe twenty. And you know what? I did learn. I read, then I wrote, then I read some more, then I wrote some more, and I got a little better. I still made mistakes, but I made better mistakes. You can’t learn to write from a book–you learn to write by writing–but books (and blog posts and podcasts and YouTube videos and, especially, critique partners) help. So today I’ll share my top 6 writing…
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Photos from Sabino Canyon Recreation Area (#FOTD)
Hubs and I visited Sabino Canyon for the first time yesterday. We only made it about a half mile on the trail before the heat sent us scurrying (OK, plodding) back to our air-conditioned car. I hear tell there’s a lake and running water further up the trail, but we’ll see that another time, when it isn’t in the 90s and monsoon-humid. Hot or not, it was lovely out in the desert. We’ve had tons of rain–the wettest July on record–so the desert is lush and green and smells of fresh rain and creosote. The cacti are plumped up, and we even saw tadpoles in a puddle along the trail.…
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My Favorite Writing Tools 2: Writing Trackers
If you haven’t figured out by now that I’m a hopeless nerd, this part of the post ought to clarify that point. I *love* trackers. I find them motivating, and I need all the motivation I can get. I own a FitBit and obsess about my standings in the Workweek Hustle Challenge (I was even more ridiculous about it during quarantine). I track my habits (exercise, personal development, and about six others) in Toodledoo. And of course I track my writing. I’ve tried a few writing trackers and settled on two that I like: Online Writing Log (OWL) OWL lets me track word count and time spent by project, set…
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Passion flowers at the Tucson Botanical Gardens (#FOTD)
Long-suffering husband and I visited the Tucson Botanical Gardens yesterday for the first time since December (see pix from that trip here and here). We’re having a wet monsoon season, so we hoped for lots of flowers–and got our wish. Their butterfly garden includes these wonderful passion vines twining around the trunks of huge mesquite trees. I love the intricate detail of passion flowers–so lovely after a couple of months of dry, scorching heat. Posted for Cee’s Flower of the Day challenge.
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Hope: the engine that drives human activity (and Vegas)
This post is part of the Stream of Consciousness Saturday blog hop. Linda Hill posts a prompt every Friday; this week’s prompt is, “hope.” Remember the story of Pandora’s Box? Pandora was like Eve, only instead of being told not to eat an apple, Pandora was told not to open a box. Of course she opened it anyway, only to find it contained all the evils of the world. The evils flew out, as evils are wont to do, and poor Pandora poked around in the bottom of the box, desperately searching for something good amid all the horror. And what she found was Hope. Two thoughts come to mind…
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What would make me quit writing (#IWSG)
This post is part of the Insecure Writers Support Group monthly blog hop. On the first Wednesday of each month, I and my fellow insecure writers post something related to writing, and then we visit the blogs of our fellow members and read and comment on their IWSG posts. This month’s optional question is, What would make you quit writing? Sometimes these IWSG monthly questions are timely. Back in April, I wrote about a problem I was having with my right arm. In looking over that piece, I realize I failed to explain exactly what went wrong and why I included a pretty diagram of arm veins in the post. Ah,…
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The Ancient Pueblo Ruins of Wupatki National Monument
When I lived in Flagstaff, I was about half an hour from the pueblo ruins of Wupatki National Monument. In this post, I’ll share some photos as well as some links in case you’d like to learn more about this wonderful place. This post is part of Anita’s Amazing Stonework photo challenge. Please click on each image to see the entire picture. For some reason, my WordPress theme cuts off parts of some pictures. Wupatki preserves several pueblos built by the Ancient Pueblo People sometime between 500 and about 1000 AD. The structures are built from the local red sandstone and mortared in place. The fact that these structures are…
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My Favorite Writing Tools 1: Notebooks, Pens, Note-Taking Software, and Writing Software
Other writers procrastinate by binge-watching Netflix or reorganizing the contents of their hard drives or scrolling Twitter for 6.5 hours. I procrastinate by playing with new productivity tools (and scrolling Twitter for 6.5 hours and occasionally binge-watching Lucifer and… wait, where was I? Oh, yeah, productivity.) I geek out on notebooks, writing software, pens… basically anything that lets me feel like I’m doing something writing-related when I’m actually farting around. But when I’m not farting around, I do appreciate having a solid suite of tools to help me organize the jumbled mess that spews out of my brain in search of a place to splat. I’ve tried a bunch (see:…
Janet Alcorn
Suspense | Horror | Romance
