Even my cat, Lucca Spaghetti, can’t believe it. Looks like I’ll make the NaNoWriMo 50K in 30 Days deadline. MORE COFFEE!

Here we go again. 50,000 words in 30 days. That’s the National Novel Writing Month challenge. Day two and I’m in 1950 words. Not a lot, but I’m doing it differently from the way I did my first challenge.

This year I’m a *pantser*- that’s a writer who didn’t use an outline and is writing by the seat of their pants. Last year my room looked like the Op Center at NORAD. Giant post-it notes stuck to walls with timelines and names and an area to plot the progression of the manuscript.

I probably should have done it the same way this year – but at the very last minute, and I mean less than twenty four hours until go-time- I decided not to use the month for a non-fiction book of blessings that I’m working on. I had to get back to the crazy storyline I started last year in the paranormal/action/romance series, The Leelanau Chronicles.

The thing about NaNoWriMo that makes it so much fun and ridiculously difficult at the same time is that you aren’t supposed to edit as you write. Word count is the name of the game. Just slap whatever comes into your head down on the paper and keep on going. There will be time to weed out the garbage and fix all the mistakes after November 30 when the clock strikes midnight.

That’s easier said than done. The primal urge to edit our writing is akin to the reflex of salivating when we smell cookies baking or when we see Tom Hiddleson doing anything adorable. It is so hard to step away from the bad sentence…the atrocious grammar…the phrase that makes no fricking sense at all.

So I’m in it now and I won’t come out until I get to the other side of this story. See you at the finish line……

My working book cover for inspiration-

I have a friend who lives in summertime along this hidden stretch of heaven.

Wind dances across the bay bringing constant change to a view and I could watch for days. When I visit, I rise up with the sun-a thing that does not happen naturally in my own suburban home. Too much interference from buildings, traffic, and electrical gadgets that make cities go…it keeps the ancient call to rise buried beneath the noise.

Out here though, on Cathead Bay, it’s just me and the wind. Me and the sky. Me and the water. Me and the stars. Me and the thoughts I can’t hear when I’m in my noisy world. Me and the friends that welcome me in to their little bit of heaven.

Thank you, Patty, for letting me know this Northern Michigan treasure hidden from the world and for your long friendship. I am grateful.

Love,

Mimi

Erin’s latest book release! A finalist in the Saturday Evening Post 2014 Great American Fiction Contest

Writers!

Here’s a fantastic article on Writing and Revising by friend/author, Erin Bartels. Lots of meaty thoughts in here.

Eat it up and then drop her a note at erinbartels.com and tell her I said hello.

https://capitalcitywritersassociation.wordpress.com/2015/08/17/how-to-enjoy-the-revision-process/

At the water’s edge on Grand Traverse Bay, beneath the blue moon of late July, I met a cluster of butterflies who fluttered and hovered and drew near to see who I was. It happened at the Friday night Music in the Park in Northport, Michigan.

While people are fighting traffic in cities or hunkering down on sofas to recover from the work week, the people of Northport are carrying lawn chairs, blankets and baskets of food down to the marina where they join friends and neighbors at the band shell for the weekly summer concerts. First class musicians fill the air with their talent. Teenagers search the crowd for crushes. Neighbors pass the food plates and share the cold drinks from their coolers. Grandmother’s in flowing wearable art vests take the hands of tiny children and dance while everyone watches – reveling in the Arcadian beauty of moving with the music on a perfect summer night.

Rows of lawn chairs spread out in soft semi circles that change shape as they are turned to accommodate a conversation that soon includes the others around.

In the midst of making an offer on a key business in this beautiful water town my daytime had been filled with the casual popping in and out of impromptu chats with shop and gallery owners that I’ve met on my previous visits. Each local person asked if I’d be at the marina that evening. “Don’t miss it, Mimi! Everyone will be there.” The statement was accurate.

Expecting to melt into the hundreds of people who gather every week at the water end of Nagonaba Street, I entered much more than a concert area. These events are the social highlight of the season when the year round population swells with summer residents and tourists. Five steps into the area and hands were going up in greeting. I watched several people rise from chairs and wind their way through the crowd towards me before I even set down the folding chair my friends had provided.

For a moment, I felt like it was 1969 and I’d just come up the steps of the bleachers at a high school football home game where everyone turns their heads to see who was standing down at the rail scanning the crowd for friends and open seats. I only knew two people well in that little ocean of faces; one for more than thirty five years, the other for twenty three years. The fast familiarity and friendly gestures of those I’d recently met took me by surprise.

Men from restaurants and art galleries waved greetings from their chairs. Women though, we do not let opportunities pass by to get to know more about the new girl. I sat for all of a minute before I noticed that making their way towards me were some of the Queens of Northport.

These women have watched every business open,  or close or hopefully survive the years since a time when their grandparents were alive. They have been a part of it all since their own childhoods floated by on tanned feet with ice cream running down fingers from cones they couldn’t lick fast enough on July evenings. They are artists and poets, retired business women and heiresses, some who have lived by the bay for fifty years. They are silver haired butterflies who fluttered around me and took my hand to lead me away to join their clusters for a little while.

Like players in a Midsummer Night’s Dream, these Titanias leaned forward in chairs to listen wide-eyed as I shared my vision of how I planned to use the lovely space I am purchasing. With clapping hands and excited cues they called others of their butterfly kaleidoscope over to hear the story as well. The experience left me feeling like I’d been dusted with glitter and blessings from the queens.

By the time the music ended I was floating away on the dreamy cloudless night; the musical score- a background for those conversations and well wishes of the women who will become familiar co-conspirators in the joyful adventure I’m embarking on.

A curtsy to the Queens. Thank you for making my first Music in the Park so shiny.

Beauty, beauty everywhere.

Like Alice Dreger, I am an East Lansing mom whose two kids went through the very high school where Alice sat in on her son’s sex-ed class last spring. I’m so happy that she used her social network platform to go “over the wall” and report back what sort of crap soup our kids were being fed, on our dime, in the classroom at school.

BRAVO Alice Dreger! Let conservative parents teach mythological medicine in their own homes and churches. Public schools should teach REAL sciences and ONLY real sciences.

Church people: If you want to teach superstition, mythology or other non-secular topics, open your own private schools like Catholics have for ages and send your kids there.

They can certainly afford to do that without breaking a sweat.

In fact, the money East Lansing High School paid to this No-Choice “education program”… to spread their dogma came from MY tax dollars and went into THIER “tax exempt” bank accounts. The same massive bank accounts they use to buy politicians and P.R. campaigns like the grossly misleading *Planned Parenthood Sells Body Parts* campaign they launched this month nationwide to garner votes for “THEIR” candidates. And we wonder how a mouth breather like Wisconsin Governor, Scott Walker got elected…

Follow the money…

Look at this:
The Yearly Cost of Religious Tax Exemptions: $71,000,000,000
June 16, 2012 by Hemant Mehta
We know churches get tax exemptions, but how much money does that actually come out to?
University of Tampa professor Ryan T. Cragun along with students Stephanie Yeager and Desmond Vega ran some calculations and figured out a number:
While some people may be bothered by the fact that there are pastors who live in multimillion dollar homes, this is old news to most. But here is what should bother you about these expensive homes: You are helping to pay for them! You pay for them indirectly, the same way local, state, and federal governments in the United States subsidize religion — to the tune of about $71 billion every year.

Read more about Alice’s adventure in instant media fame and the terrific outcome from her honest and hilarious live-tweeting from inside the schoolroom.

http://www.thestranger.com/blogs/slog/2015/07/15/22551061/east-lansing-is-getting-a-new-sex-ed-curriculum