How to use this Page

Writing friends, I just gave up. Completely surrendered.

Again.

And you know what? It felt great. I’ll probably do it again tomorrow. And the next day, too.

I see the confusion on your face. Surrender?? Gave up on what???

Stuff I have no control over. Factors outside my influence. The immoveable metric ton of tricksy particulars I keep trying to shoulder. Pesky things like:

–the economy

–market and genre trends

–shifting state of the publishing industry

–today’s seven figure deal for the latest self-published/YA/fanfic/erotica/BDSM/OCD/PTSD/STFU phenom

–three day auctions

–past failures

–past revisions

–past mistakes
–present learning curve

–rejection

–silence

–editorial taste

–editorial lists

–acquisitions meetings

–editorial boards

–the submission process

–submission response times

–NYC weather

–THE SPEED OF LIGHT

Maybe your list is different. Maybe you’re querying agents or staring at your debut’s book cover or sobbing over your last royalty statement. But I bet you have a list. Take a good hard look at it, and ask yourself if you’re like me, a writer who needs to put her hands up and say…

I am not psychic. I am not a special snowflake. I am not superman, yet I am not immune to kryptonite. I am just a girl, sitting in a red chair, typing some words. I am just trying to tell a story, the best way that I can. I can control the words. I can’t control the rest. The rest will not cripple or paralyze or smother the joy I find in words. Yesterday and today and tomorrow.  Amen.

Surrender is sweet. I highly recommend it.

NOTE TO SELF: MUSSELS ARE NOT THE MOST VISUAL MULLOSKS


One thing for sure is that anybody hoping for some exciting viewing on MusselCam will be disappointed, but then that's the way Mother Nature works. Unbelievable as it may seem MusselCam located in Prince Edward Island, Canada, was named amongst the top 25 most interesting webcams in the world. Hey - now that's an accomplishment!

That lone blue mussel is the only one of two Canadian entries to crack EarthCam's list. A webcam tracking the lighthouse at scenic Peggy's Cove in Nova Scotia
(www.peggyscovewebcam.ca/live) is also on the webcam network's list of favourites.

For the uninitiated and according to Wikipedia, "the common name mussel is used for members of several different families of clams or bivalve molluscs, from both saltwater and freshwater habitats."

Visually they aren't anything to look at being round and...round.

The message on the web page says it all: "mussels grow very, very slowly. Please check back often."

Garner Quain, the co-owner of Flex Mussels, which has locations in Charlottetown and Summerside, was surprised to hear his camera made the list.

"I didn't ever think that it would make any kind of Top 10 list, other than the fact that it's so, kind of, notoriously boring," said Quain."There's a few other ones on the internet that are sort of old favourites that have kind of always been running, so it was really kind of an homage to those, so to be included among them is a nice little honour."

Quain said MusselCam gets more than 1,000 hits a day.

Anyway, if you've got a lot of time - and patience - drop by the musselcam site here:

http://www.flexmussels.com/musselcam.html

Let us know if anything exciting happens. Yawn...

We had visitors swim in this past week to help Captain SeaCroft in his quest to clean up the sea: Boris Blowfish, Jasper Jellyfish, BuckStar (and you thought I was going to say Starbucks didn't you?) Clam-mity and Corabell Clownfish.

I think I'm in the sea, snail and bug mode of illustrating right now. This illo is not part of the original "captain" concept but one I've had in my sketchbook for some time. These cheery fellows were just wiggling off the page saying "pick us to be your visitors please!"