It Was Sunny All Day

Sunny and warm, but the best part of the day was LC's piano recital. She played her song beautifully for someone in her first year of piano. I'm sure her knees were knocking but she went up there and played like a champ. I'm so proud of her. In fact, she's the first item on my Gratitude Journal page today. Everything else pales in comparison.

The watercolor today was patterns. I'm sure that I did this wrong if you can make paint strokes wrong. My arrangement isn't the best, crowded on the left and spread out on the right, and I didn't use the whole sheet of paper so I could have put this all in the middle. Instead I crammed it all in on the left. Maybe I'll take another stab at it tomorrow. I don't hate it and it was kind of fun just making paint marks.

There are hardly any suet pellets left in the feeder as you can see, but this Downy Woodpecker managed to cling to the feeder so that he could peck away at what was left.

And the male Cardinal hopped around on the ground for a while looking for things to eat. I need to fill all the feeders tomorrow so that there's food for all.

I had an online writing workshop this morning that gave me a lot to think about. She mostly focused on mystery and crime writing but a lot of what she said pertains to my kind of writing too, like putting trouble and worry on every page. ON EVERY PAGE. I'm having trouble putting trouble in every scene or chapter, how am I ever going to put it on every page. I think I could do worry on pages too. Rose worries about how she's going to pay for everything if she doesn't get more paying guests. She worries about Calvin getting in and fiddling with the plumbing thinking that she'd have to call him to fix it. (She doesn't.) She has to worry about the rumors that Mrs. Whiting spreads about her looking down on the people of Anguilla and how she's only there to make money. Oh, and she's only interested in Iggy for the sex. Sorry to bore you with this but sometimes it helps to talk it out.

Another thing she said was to cut down or eliminate most of the instances of "but," "so," "some," and "that." I spent two hours after the recital going through the manuscript with the Find function to make decisions on the over 350 instances of the word "but." Some of them were butter or button but the large majority of them were just plain old "but." I cut out about 100 of them. Tomorrow I'll tackle "so."

And she said to eliminate most dialogue tags, the "he said" and "she said" in the story. I don't know how I feel about that. I'll eliminate some of them but if I feel like it's hard to tell who's talking I'll leave them in.

So that was my day. I hope you had a good Saturday. We went for custard after the recital. I had chocolate with hot fudge. It was yummy.

--Barbara