What's It All About?

The short story I wrote for the Writers group's annual Halloween short story writing contest is finished and sent to the contest officials. Voting will begins now and ends on Halloween. There were more entries this year than usual, or so it seems to me. I don't expect to win the contest, and in fact I don't even much like my story.

Oh well . . .

. . .

My next project is to write a complete 60,000 word novel within the month of November. Yes, the NaNoWriMo -- the National Novel Writing Month. The aim of the exercise is to write a complete novel in one month without worrying about the novel's quality and focusing only on getting down a minimum number of words. If the author then wants to go ahead and revise or rewrite the novel with an aim to improve it and possibly make it salable to a print publisher, that's fine. But the idea is to write the novel and not get sidetracked by anything.

. . .

Mike called my attention early this morning to the low clouds toward the Santa Catalina mountains as seen from the swimming pool deck.

. . .

Some pictures need no prose description

(click the pic for a larger view)

. . .

A piece in Sparks For Thought begins:

We inhabit an enormous galaxy
consisting of at least 200 billion stars.

Since the dawn of time, for 14 billions years, it wanders the endless dark, its sparkling arms rotating around its luminous centre. Like a flying saucer it travels and travels with no destination set and with it so do we. But it’s not a lonely traveler. There are relatives everywhere, close and distant. Other galaxies traveling and trailing their destiny through our known dark sea. And anywhere we turn to look we discover even more of these relatives in this huge galactic family. The total number of galaxies in the cosmos is an unimaginable 100 billion.

Wow! Just think about that. The universe is so huge a human being cannot even conceive of such vastness. And our relatively puny world, The Earth, is so small, so insignificant...

Yet, here I sit tapping out words as if doing so counts for something.

Good Grief!