Healing Field at Tempe Town Lake

Every year at Tempe Beach Park, they set up flags in the park in memory of the people killed in the 9/11 attacks. It's touching and sad.

Some of the cards have very, very basic information. Some have more detail. If you click the images, they should enlarge so you can read them.

Long time, no write!

Work's been so busy lately, which can make it a little hard to write. At least, when my work also involves writing, albeit nonfiction!

I did recently review Karyn Henley's Eye of the Sword. It's a rollicking fantasy, though the portrayal of angels was not my thing.

The one thing I have managed to update daily is Daily Duffy, if tiny bears and/or Disneyland Resort interest you. I can hardly wait to go back again...!

Disneyland Dream Suite

So I've never been in the Disneyland Dream Suite and never will be there...but here's the most amazing trip report I've ever seen on it!

http://micechat.com/forums/disneyland-resort/171427-joes-epic-overnight-disneyland-dream-suite-trip-report-lots-pictures-2.html

As for writing, the main thing is to plow along, I think, and not get distracted by the Internet.

D'oh! I did pretty well at lunch today and my story finally seems to be progressing. One big part of writing is not only giving your characters a goal, but giving them goals the reader can care about. One of the problems I had was that my main character had a goal, but not one that was very interesting...so I upped the stakes.

Not wanting to die is a less abstract goal!

It's Like This, Cat - Mini-review

So as I mentioned earlier, when I went on vacation the return flight home had no wi-fi. I had downloaded "It's Like This, Cat" by Emily Neville after running a search for free books involving "Coney Island."

When I started reading, I had forgotten all about it and assumed it was an indie book. It seemed perhaps a little simplistic and at the start I could tell the male point-of-view character was written by a woman. Other than that, it was kind of a sweet read, definitely entertaining in an airplane.

So then when I looked at home I realized it won a Newberry Medal in the 1960s as a children's book. Ah well.

My main complaint is that the cat initially draws the reader in, but by the end of the story the cat seems insignificant. The author even reminds the reader that everything happened because of the cat, but I feel like if you need reminded, the story hasn't done its job.

Obviously it's a good story, though, what with the Newberry and all. It's kind of funny how even a self-published author would mentally criticize something they thought was an "indie" book. Though in fairness, I was at a writing panel at Tus-Con one year and the group of writers, led by an author/panelist, figured out how we could improve the opening paragraphs of Dune. So I think it's more my writer's editing tendencies than it is judging a book because of my perceptions of the author.

I think.