Trying to get in the Groove

I keep waiting for things to get "normal". I'm not sure why I think that's even possible. When was the last time I knew what a week was going to look like? But it does seem like this month has been a little busier than usual.

We moved into our new-to-us apartment in the West End...all 500 sq ft of it. That's been a bit of an editing procedure but I really quite love it - aside from the Barbie and Ken-sized kitchen and that Kevin has to crawl over me to get out of bed. Somehow, I just really like the whole play-house-ness of it.

And of course I started my new job. That is too funny. I am the new intern at Vancouver Magazine. Being the new intern does not translate to being the young intern. Au contraire. I am the old lady that is in the position normally reserved for keen-twenty-something-year-olds not forty-eight year old ladies. Ah. But therein lies the beauty of it. I am old enough not to take any of it too seriously. This doesn't mean, I'm not doing my very-darned-best to be the best fact checker ever (!) and learn everything I can, but I am just not into the game of it. But hey, I remember what the burning-hot ambition felt like, so it's not that long ago....

I'm just back from the marathon event of the Surrey International Writers Festival. What an intense long weekend. Met some really cool people that I hope to see again. I'm going to stay on the SIWC RSS feed and hope to get involved in a weekly critique group. http://www.siwc.ca/rss.xml

The SIWC, and specifically, Darren Barefoot's - http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/ -workshop, is what inspired me to get back onto my blog. My goal is to keep this up on a more consistent basis.

Two of the books that I'm planning on picking up this week are as a result of this conference;
Save the Cat by Blake Snyder and Tell it Slant by Brenda Miller. The Snyder book was recommended by Wally Lane http://www.screenwritingtostandard.com/ and the Miller book by Cricket Freeman http://www.augustagency.com/

Just finishing my edit of the early retirement piece that will be in Homemakers Magazine some time in 2009. Working with Janet Rowe is a real treat and a great way to learn better writing skills.

That's it. I've done my first post since July. Going to finish up with some reading and call it a day.

Ephemera - Altered Books

It's 9:52 pm. Just finished rearranging my little office again. Seems it's the only way I ever actually clean it is to throw everything into the bedroom and then slowly reintroduce it back in, piece by piece. I had this compulsion for several reasons, first, because that's just what I do. I need to shake things up and can't stand anything to stay the same too long. Second, I'm avoiding the article about Malawi that I need to write. A more gracious explanation could be that I'm incubating ideas...yeh, that's it. Third, I'm onto this altered book thing. I love collages. Love them. And have seen altered books at various points over the last couple years, but somehow it just really hit me the other day, that I really, really had to get going on this. So, of course, the office space must be reconfigured to add this new area for exactly that. Tomorrow, I start. Gluing, cutting, pasting, collecting little bits of maps, tissue, cards, words, ephemera as they say in the collage and altered book world...ephemera...things of no lasting significance. Ephemeral - that which is fleeting, that which lasts a very short time.