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#FOTD: Spring crocus
When I lived in wintery places like Portland and Flagstaff, I loved crocuses, because they bloomed so early and brought a little color to the drab late winter landscape. Hang on a little longer, they seemed to say. Sunshine and light are coming. That seems an apt message for this time of year and these times we live in. Hang on, y’all. Sunshine and light are coming.
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A beautiful day in the neighborhood #3: red tails in the trees
We’re still getting used to being city dwellers after spending the last 6 1/2 years in rural Flagstaff. One of our biggest surprises has been the number of birds in our midtown Tucson neighborhood. We have tons of doves, flocks of them in the trees and foraging in our front yard, along with a few pigeons and some other birds I haven’t identified yet. The coolest of the avian life forms, though, are the red-tailed hawks and cooper’s hawks. The red tails have a nest in a huge eucalyptus tree down the road from us, and they hang out in the dead tree in front of my neighbor’s house. My…
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7 Reasons Why I Will Hate Your Book
Happy IWSG Day! For those who are new here, I participate in the monthly Insecure Writers Support Group blog hop. This month’s optional question is: Being a writer, when you’re reading someone else’s work, what stops you from finishing a book/throws you out of the story/frustrates you the most about other people’s books? The more I learn about the craft of writing, the more I read differently. I notice problems in other people’s writing to which I would have been oblivious before. Before, I might have noticed that I wasn’t really into a book, that the book didn’t hook me or engage me or hold my attention, but I might not have…
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Looking back on 2020, Episode 2: Attack of the Books
I don’t know what I was thinking when I created my first Looking Back on 2020 post and decided to riff on Star Wars movie titles. Now I feel like I’ve committed to writing 9 of these posts (or 11 if you count Rogue One, which you definitely should, and Solo, which you probably shouldn’t). I’m not sure anyone wants to read that many posts about my experiences in 2020. Maybe I can shift to the original trilogy for looking forward to 2021 (2021: A New Hope has a nice ring to it). Anyhoo, let’s move on to one of my favorite topics as a writer and lifelong reader: books!…
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A beautiful day in the neighborhood #2: Holiday Creosote
Continuing my attempt to notice the beautiful and/or quirky in my everyday surroundings. Tucson is a quirky and beautiful city, so I should have no shortage of material. I love this little neighborhood experiment–communal decorating of a creosote bush. It says so much about the kind of attitude that helps us get through tough times and lead a happy life: making due with what you have (because Christmas trees don’t really grow in the desert) and inviting others to share what they have to create something beautiful and joyful.
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#FOTD: Coke can flower
For Cee’s Flower of the Day photo challenge. We live only a mile or so from the Tucson Botanical Garden, and we decided to check it out during Winter Break. We had to cancel our Winter Break travel plans due to the Microbe that Must not be Named, so we are exploring our new city instead (outside only, masked and socially distanced). According to the audio tour: This shady barrio (neighborhood) garden came to life with the help of local Mexican-American gardeners and honors the distinctive gardens and yards found in Tucson’s Mexican-American neighborhoods… the distinctive decorative style featur[es] ‘found objects,’ family mementos and whimsical use of recycled materials. https://tucsonbotanical.org/tours/nuestro-jardin-audio-tour/…
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New Year’s Eve time travel
Husband: “So, what are we doing for New Year’s Eve?” Me: “Well, I hear the living room is nice this time of year.” To be fair, I’m trying to remember the last time I was up at midnight on New Year’s Eve, and… well… hmm… OK, I got nuthin’. But sometimes we do travel this time of year or do, you know, *something* that involves leaving the house, even if we are home and asleep by 10 PM. This year? Well, I hear the living room is nice this time of year. So what’s a bored blogger to do? Dig through the archives of years past, of course. Let’s climb…
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Most popular posts of 2020
I’m still trying to find my niche on this blog, so I thought it would be fun to look at my top 91 most-liked posts of 2020 to see if any themes emerge. Here they are: Post Likes #SoCS: Clearing the clutter and creating a fresh start 17 #NaNoInspo: Write Badly 12 #FOTD: Nymphaea ‘Perry’s Almost Black’ 12 #IWSG: Genre-morphing–and a question for my readers 11 #FOTD: Rocky Mountain Bee Plant (Cleome serrulata) 11 #SoCS: A skeezy wrestler, a skeezy pickup line… and me 11 #SoCS: chirurgie 11 #SoCS: What am I attracting? 10 #SoCS: The pros and cons of time travel 10 I’m the first to admit that those…
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#FOTD: Frozen mums
For Cee’s Flower of the Day photo challenge. When I lived in Flagstaff, I left plants and flowers standing after frost kill, because they provided wildlife habitat and protection for the crown of the plant (and because I was lazy). I’m not a winter person, but I learned to look closely to appreciate the textures of flower heads and stalks in the snow.
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Looking Back on 2020, Episode 1: The Phantom Plans
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, we all made plans for the bright, shiny new decade. New year, new you! Set some goals! Live your best life! Uh, huh. Man plans, and God laughs. In the immortal words of Aerosmith: Dream On. Or, in psychological terms, a lot of us spent most of 2020 orbiting the bottom sections of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. In my case, I spent most of the year orbiting my laptop, held in place by the tractor beam of Zoom meetings. Could I strain a little harder for those metaphors? I bet I could. But I won’t. I promise. Seriously, despite what…
Janet Alcorn
Suspense | Horror | Romance
