Writing the Old-Fashioned Way

 

During the five days we were without power after the recent storm, I had to do my writing the old-fashioned way with pen and paper. Even so, I managed to get a lot of writing done.

The even bigger problem was doing research without the internet. Yes, my cell phone worked, and I could have used it to search for information, but the options for charging it were inconvenient and I didn’t want to waste my battery life on researching a story.

While waiting for the electricity to come back on, I started a new middle-grade novel. This is a contemporary story about a girl whose mother sends her to live with the father she has never known. That involves a bus trip from Florida to Indiana, but how long would it take? Without the internet to look up bus schedules, I had to guestimate it using what hardcopy resources I had.

The atlas said the distance from Miami to Indianapolis is just under 1,200 miles. Since my protagonist begins and ends her journey in small towns, it can’t be an express, so I worked the math out this way. Assuming a bus normally travels at sixty-miles-per-hour, it would take an express bus approximately twenty hours to cover the distance. But since it wasn’t an express and would be making frequent (albeit short) stops in small towns, I estimated that it would take about 1½ times as long, or thirty hours, so that’s what I used until I had the internet again. I’m not looking to use an actual schedule or a named bus line, but I still want to get the general parameters fairly close.

Once the internet was back, I checked the bus schedule and adjusted my time accordingly. There is no direct route and I had to add some transfers, but thirty hours wasn’t that far off. So I’m grateful that I had an old-fashioned paper atlas as a resource.

I was also grateful for the other physical resources I had at my fingerprints, including a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a book of baby names for naming my characters.

I was ecstatic when the electricity came back on and I could return to writing on my laptop and using the internet for research, but I will never underestimate the value of writing the old-fashioned way.

Sometimes it’s the only choice.

Stormy Weather

 

“Stormy Weather” will not be the name of my next published book after all, but it is literally the title of my life last week.

I had written and scheduled my next two blog posts on dragonflies and a great egret, respectively, but Mother Nature had other ideas. You’ll get those later, but for now they have been preempted by the storm that disrupted our lives.

Roland and I had been in North Carolina for a baby shower for our first grandchild, and we returned on Monday, August 10. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that we were already home rather than driving through it.

The storm came up quickly on Tuesday morning. I wish I had had the presence of mind to take photos of the breathtaking lightning and slashing rain outside the dining room windows, but I didn’t, and there is no way words can describe the scene. Suffice it to say that I had never seen such wild weather.

We discovered later that the storm is classified as a derecho, which is a widespread and long-lived line of thunderstorms that produces very high winds and significant wind damage. There can be tornados within or associated with the derecho, but a derecho moves in a straighter line and covers a much larger area than a tornado does. That’s a simplistic definition, but it’s enough for this blog post.

When the storm cleared, it left trees uprooted and branches scattered all over the neighborhood. The photo at the top of this page shows a tree that fell on the roof of the adult education room at our church, which is just down the street from our condo. Fortunately, the damage to the roof was minor and the leaks were quickly patched. The grounds around the church weren’t as lucky, and many of the trees in the beautifully landscaped campus are no more.

Our condo complex suffered a similar fate. The damage to the building was minor, mostly consisting of lost siding, but some of the trees in front were destroyed. The next photo was taken from our balcony shortly after the worst of the storm passed over, and the one after it is a closer up shot of the same tree when I went out for a walk on Wednesday morning. I thank God that it fell on and blocked the driveway in front of the condo rather than falling in the other direction and crashing through our window.

We lost power for five days. I had clothes in the washer, but, fortunately, it had almost finished so I hung the damp clothes up to dry. Unfortunately, the humidity was so high that some of them didn’t dry for several days.

For us, the loss of power was a bigger issue than the storm damage itself, although the extent of the damage was what kept NIPSCO from restoring the power for so long. Roland had to drive ten miles just to find ice for our cooler. Even with that, we had to throw out everything in the freezer.

Figuring out what to eat was also a problem. We had plenty of bread and luncheon meat (which we moved to the cooler as soon as we got ice), so we ended up eating of lot of sandwiches. We had taken some boeuf bourguignon out of the freezer to defrost for dinner and ended up eating it cold. The Munster Lyons Club had donated their building for a charging station and free meals, and we ate there once. A local grocery store with a generator continued selling its fried chicken, and with one thing and another, we managed.

My biggest problem was boredom. Between the natural light coming through the window during the day and a few battery-powered lanterns, we had enough light to read by. Without TV or the internet, however, we discovered that even reading and Roland’s crossword puzzles couldn’t keep the boredom away. It did help me, however, when I came up with the plot for a new book and started writing it with pen and paper.

They say necessity is the mother of invention. Although we have some battery-powered lanterns, we were afraid of running out of D batteries. I have a small but powerful flashlight that takes AA batteries and I had plenty of those, so I created my own lamp out of that flashlight, a paper clip, and a wire stand that we had been using to display a wooden egg from Romania. That way I could (and did) use the flashlight for reading and writing without having to hold it. If you look closely, you can see my homemade lamp in the next photo.

We made it through the big storm and the smaller ones that followed, but I am proudest of my church’s flagpole and the American flag that there was no time to lower before the storm hit. As you can see from the final photo, they stood tall and proud and remain a symbol of our country’s strength even among adversity.

God bless America.

Summer Flowers

 

I try to walk for at least an hour three times a week, although other commitments sometimes interfere. Today’s blog post is given over to photos of flowers I see along my regular walking paths. I’m not good at identifying flowers, but I had help from an app, so hopefully I got them right.

The photo at the top shows tiger lilies, which have always been one of my favorite flowers.

This photo of butterweed was taken along Schoon Ditch, just south of Munster High School.

I’m pretty sure this is mock orange, but it’s the one I had the hardest time identifying.

This next one is spiderwort.

Finally, these orange daylilies are everywhere along my walking paths. This particular one is past its prime, and I do have a better picture of one that isn’t, but I like the buds and the “arms” in this photo.

Next week I’ll treat you to dragonflies.

Butterflies

 

I’ve been enjoying the butterflies all summer, including the Eastern tiger swallowtail that perched on the flowers on my balcony while I took the photo at the head of this post. As summer draws closer to the end—especially for schoolchildren and their teachers—I’ll be concentrating my blog on the signs of summer that will be ending as well.

This week’s post is a poem about butterflies that I originally wrote in 2012, although I added the verse about the swallowtails this year.

                         Butterflies

Common Buckeye

A buck’s eyes prance across the wings

That hover low above the ground

From gravel path to grassy verge

And roadside park.

 

Red Admiral

 

A ring of fire encircles him

When wings are spread apart,

Or underlines the white and black

When raised in victory.

 

Clouded Sulfur

 

Alfalfa fields a common haunt

For your night-feeding frenzy,

A pretty sight to untrained eyes

But no friend to farmers.

 

Monarch

 

Milkweed stalks with silken heads

Become a Monarch’s throne.

Then winter comes and orange and black

Aims south and flies away.

 

Swallowtails

 

Black outlined in yellow

Or yellow outlined in black,

Two delicate tails

Set them apart.

 

I’ll end this post the way I started, with the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail.

Join me next week for flowers I see along my walking trails.