Or...
The good, the bad, and well, what I’m doing.
You know how we have had a long record of wrongs the
President and his cohorts have done to harm this country and alienate our
allies. Now you know he is changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake
America; how insulting is that?!
Well, that isn’t what I want to write about.
Notice that we don’t see much about the Epstein files
anymore—he has done a good job turning our attention away from those.
I didn’t want to write about those either.
After committing absurdity after absurdity that would
take pages to enumerate, and you guys know them already anyway, he is now
setting the stage as he did before the last two Presidential elections, making
us doubt the legitimacy of any election where he is not the winner. And look
what he is doing with AI, portraying himself pumped up, then insulting his
opponents. They are as fake as his qualifications for being the Chief of this
country.
And the Republican Party is holding on by the skin of
its teeth. Don’t you wonder why?
Ha ha. “Money makes the world go round.”
Sometimes we need to shut up and let a picture tell
the story.
This is from Robert Reich’s Substack post:
$594 million in 2017 from his own endeavors.
$ 2.24 billion after he became president.
How do you like the price of those eggs?
Holy Schmoley!
A Reprieve:
Saturday: My daughter, grandson, and I visited a farm where she chose two baby goats to be Daughter Dear’s in the middle of September.
I sat on a pile of pallets, and one little female goat climbed onto my lap and slept while Daughter Dear talked with the owner. She will be getting neutered males, gently neutered, using rubber bands. All the females were already reserved.
Neutered males are called wethers, and they are gentle and lovable; we know because we had two when we lived in the forest of Oregon.
Here are two little females we bottle-fed in Hawaii:
All our goats kept the brush around the house cleared.
All were free-range because we had the room. The goats we will get this time
will need to be penned. Too bad, but necessary.
We hear goats love to eat blackberry vines, and blackberry
vines are taking over the back portion of the property. Husband dear had cut
them a few months ago, but the vines loved their hair cutting so much they
broke out in song and grew new stalks.
I won’t use poison on them—and they know it.
Goats to the rescue. We have an extra wild area behind
the outbuilding behind our backyard we call the Wayback, where I have my office
and where I am writing to you right now.
My Saturday lap baby wasn’t for sale. The young
man who ran the farm adopted her. She was the third of triplets to be born. Two
larger, stronger males were born before her, and the mother said, “That’s
enough,” and focused on the strong ones. Her adopted dad takes her into the
house at night, and she sleeps on his lap.
I was recharged on the farm. I felt its peacefulness
the moment I stepped out of the car.
Back to Writing:
For the last couple of weeks, I had been rewriting old
stories, editing, and submitting some to agents with no responses, but I had a
brilliant idea.
“You need to write a new book.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, write about things working instead of things
not working.”
You know that people loved Chicken Soup for the
Soul by Jack Canfield—it sold a kazillion copies.
You know that people loved Robert Fulghum’s “All I
Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten?” It was on the New York
Times List for almost two Years.
So, see, people do like uplifting stories. Yes, yes, I
know, those were non-fiction. I am talking about fiction.
It doesn’t matter; it tells me people want to believe
in good, to see the world as a safe place, to realize life has its struggles, yet
to hold an idea such as W. Clement Stone had when he said, “I believe God is a
reverse pessimist; He conspires to do me good.” With fiction, you need conflict,
or you have no story—so say the writing gurus. Okay, we’ll see what transpires.
Then, to give me cause for pause, this week I read a
post by an author saying he gave up writing and it almost killed him. He had
written a book; it was published and got good reviews, but it didn’t sell.
He was devastated.
He languished in misery. Stopped writing. Took up
tennis, and became fanatical with it: lessons, practicing daily,
He didn’t miss writing.
And then it slammed in on him. He did miss it.
So, why am I writing when there are authors far better
than me out there?
Because I want to.
So, I began, and for the first 24,000 words it flowed.
It felt like the universe was throwing helpers at me. Amazing people
(fictitious) appeared on the road to somewhere.
Elevator pitch for “No Working Title:”
“Fifteen-year-old Josie is on the run—no folks, her
92-year-old grandmother has died, so with a GED, a driver’s learner’s permit,
and being an emancipated teenager, she and her dog, Zeus, climb into
Grandmother’s pickup and aim for parts unknown.”
P.S. Josie grows up.