My Christmas Story

Good morning! For anyone who is interested, I've finished writing my Christmas Story over at Fifteen Minutes Of Fiction. It's a three part story titled "The Toyota And The Stable", and you can find the first part here: The Toyota.

Hiking Table Rock and Baldpate

Well, in case you didn't know, Ben and Bobby and I hiked Table Rock, West Baldpate, and Baldpate yesterday. It was an unusual hike...lots of fun and a bit of excitement thrown in. In all, about seven hours of hiking between Rte 26 in Newry, and East B Hill Road in Andover. (although that wasn't the end of the hike, since Ben made the mistake of parking his truck at the Appalachian Trail, thinking it was a different trail head, about 2.5 miles away. Yeah, that's right...when we got to the "end" of our hike, we weren't anywhere near the vehicle!)

Anyway, there's something I wrote about the hike here: October Climb, and something else here: Hike Report: Table Rock, West Baldpate, Baldpate.

One very strange and eerie part of the day was standing near the peak of West Baldpate and seeing this:



What makes it so eerie is that fact that directly in front of me as I'm taking that picture there is a mountain peak. I know it's there, but all I can see is clouds, like a blanket of white all around me.

By the way, if you look at the pictures I posted with the hike report, you'll see quite an amazing difference in climate, between the peak and the waterfall...strange to think those two pictures were taken on the same day, less than three miles apart!

A Strange Weekend

Well, the weekend's not over yet, but it's been interesting so far. To read about my day yesterday, click here.

Hope you find that amusing.

This morning I woke up with a sore throat, which was not good, since I was doing ventriloquism, music and preaching in Peru this morning.

I left home at 7:00, so I could be in Peru by 8:00. Left myself plenty of time, which was a good thing, since I totally spaced out and drove right by route 219. I drove all the way to 232, and halfway to Rumford before I realized I was in the wrong place...by then I decided it would be quickest to continue on to Rumford and then come back to Peru. :P

So, it took a lot longer getting there than I expected. Not that it mattered, since the pastor didn't show up until about 15 minutes later.

And Ben arrived 15 minutes after that. So, we had less than a half hour to get ready for Sunday School.

And the monitor wasn't working again.

And the computer wouldn't read my CD with the pwer point presentation.

Yep. Very hectic. Fortunately, they had a guy there who was able to type up everything I needed for church, during Sunday School.

Despite everything, the services went well, and the pastor said the messsage hit exactly where the church was at, so that's good! :)

On a different subject, I've now added a Weekly Writing Prompt to Fifteen Minutes Of Fiction. go ahead and give it a try if you like!

Writing For Fun

For those who didn't know, I've been away from home since Sunday. Went hiking with Jonathan and Melody on Monday (Mt Battie. And yes, I'll be writing up that hike soon). Then yesterday I was up in Kingfield working on Math Problems with Brian. I have all my problems written and proofread. Now I just need to organize them and send them off to Maryland! :)

Anyway, the post is titled "Writing For Fun", and writing math problems isn't exactly fun - not when you have a deadline to write 99 of them, and they have to have quite a few challenging ones!

But in case you've missed it, there is a new website that's all about writing for fun: Fifteen Minutes Of Fiction

Here are a couple interesting statistics about the site...

The most popular author on the site at the moment is: Rabbit Stu Yeah, that's right...the fictional alias I created on the site while testing some features, and which I use to write totally bizarre and nonsensical poetry, is the most read author so far. I'm not sure what it says that of the four most popular pages on the site, three of them are by the fictional poet Rabbit Stu. :P

Here is the most popular piece of writing on the site: Entranced By Beauty.

It is interesting to see that, even though the site is only a week old, it's already getting a fair amount of traffic. It doesn't have a lot of visitors yet, but it seems that the visitors stick around for quite awhile, reading different things on the site. There's already been over 1000 page views on the writing...not including the times that authors viewed their own writing.

Fifteen Minutes

Okay, it's not like I don't have enough blogs that I write in (not that I write in all of them faithfully!), but I've just added another one. I'm sure most of you won't be interested in keeping up with this one, because its posts are going to be pretty random.

The blog is titled "Fifteen Minutes". The basic premise of the blog is this...I enjoy writing (and I'm not talking about writing software documentation!) but I never find time to write stuff "just for fun"...but I figure I can spare FIFTEEN MINUTES here and there to write something short - a piece of descriptive writing, a poem, and nonsense story, etc.

So the rule for my new blog is, I write whatever I like, but I can't take more than FIFTEEN MINUTES to write it. Once my FIFTEEN MINUTES is up, I post what I've written.

Here's a more detailed description of the blog: FIFTEEN MINUTES: PREMISE.

I've invited a couple people to be contributing writers in this blog, one of whom has said she will try to post something from time to time.

Anyway, here is the blog address, and you will see that I've already posted a couple items...

Fifteen Minutes of Fictional Writing. What can you write in just a quarter of an hour?