Photo Friday returns!

May 9, 2014August 22, 201413 Comments

Today, I am exhausted. With a capital E. We’ve finished moving and have begun the Great Unpacking, and I’m not sure which I like less. So while we find our belongings (and maybe even our minds), here are some pictures of what the last couple of weeks have been like. Moving with family is always interesting, and probably a lot less stressful than moving with strangers because you can be yourself, whether it’s good, bad, or ugly.

If you can’t be yourself around family, who can you be yourself around?

So: Family. Moving. Pictures.

Home is where your story begins.

Our game room looks so lonely…

And I wish I could bring our pantry door – designed by Seymour! – with us.

Oh, Bubbles. 🙂

Thumper wants to pet the kitty, too!

Moving is hard work.

Did I mention that I have a partner for my Photo Friday posts? Because I seem to remember mentioning something about it. 🙂 Anyway, thanks to the Blogging 201 course I took last month, I met the lovely Charnele Henry and we decided to collaborate on Photo Fridays. We chose the theme of family, which fit in nicely with my move. You can find her post here, and be sure to check out some of her other posts, too! There’s a lot to see.

Happy Friday, everybody, and if you’re traveling for Mother’s Day this weekend, safe journey! I’ll see you all back here on Monday. 🙂

No campfire? The horror!

May 7, 20148 Comments

Today, I’m happy to have Mark R. Hunter here to talk a little about his newest book, The No-Campfire Girls. A fellow member of the Ink Slingers League, he’s a pretty funny guy with a pretty insightful take on that most dreaded of questions posed to writers: “Where do you get your inspiration?”

Take it away, Mark!

Sometimes I’ll finish a manuscript, look back over the story, and think: “Where the heck did this come from?”

On the other hand, sometimes it’s pretty clear where I got my story idea.

Storm Chaser? “Hey, I think I’ll write a story about a storm chaser.” Of course, after the initial idea things went wildly out of control, starting with the fact that my storm chaser became, technically, a disaster photographer. But Disaster Photographer didn’t have quite the same ring to it.

Coming Attractions? My unpublished novel about effort to save a drive-in movie theater was birthed while I was sitting in a drive-in movie theater. Usually in those places it’s not birth that’s going on, but conception.

Okay, maybe I do know where most of my ideas come from. The newest book, The No-Campfire Girls, can be traced easily to its source, which was an attempt by the Girl Scouts to shut down my wife’s beloved childhood camp.

I don’t use the word beloved lightly.

And she’s not the only one: A grass roots campaign sprung up, probably from the roots, of people across the area who wanted to save their camp. My wife and I came back from a visit determined to find a way to help them.

The problem:

And in the end…

May 1, 20148 Comments

Okay, so this isn’t really the end. How could it be? I’ve only just begun, after all. 🙂

But, this is the end of the posts for a while. We’re starting the hard-core moving tomorrow, we’ll be at it all weekend, and I don’t see any computer time in the schedule anywhere till Monday. And I’ll probably be around rather less than I have been lately because the only internet service available where we’re moving is either through our satellite company (prohibitively expensive) or through our cell phone provider (also prohibitively expensive, but somewhat cheaper).

So in the meantime, I’ll be cutting back to posting three times a week. The internet thing is supposed to change come fall, and I hope everything will go according to plan. I want to revive my Photo Friday feature, and I’m going to have some help this time around, so be sure to stop back next week and check it out. And I’ve been sharing some fun stuff over on Facebook this week, so there’s that. But in the meantime, here’s a pretty picture of the view from my new office: