ROW80 Check-in: Distraction

Posted by tmycann on Aug 5th, 2012 in indie, writing | 0 comments

My day was hijacked in the worst possible way this morning, with the news that yet another psycho had gone on a shooting rampage–about 20 minutes from where I live. I worried about friends and colleagues who are Sikh, who might have been there, since it was to have been a day of special celebration. I was frantic to get in touch with anyone who could reach them. And somewhat relieved, after several hours, when they were fine. I was still upset: Why would anyone target such a peace-loving group of people?

I don’t know that there will ever be answers to this question–or even the question of why theater-goers in Aurora, or students at Virginia Tech, or any of the other senseless mass murders we’ve seen in recent years, would be appropriate targets. It is unsettling that this craze seems to have accelerated, yet I’m reminded of the Benjamin Franklin quote: “Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security.”

I pray that people of good heart prevail, and we continue to defend the precious few freedoms we still have. Including the freedom of speech, which brings me squarely to my stated goals.

I don’t have an excuse for yesterday’s laziness. Finally, tonight, I cracked the file and faced the pile of edits I need to consider to prepare the Dementional manuscript for public consumption. I had been worried by my editor’s verbal notes, that there would need to be wholesale rewrites. As I managed the first 10% of the manuscript this evening, though, I’m appreciating the process of tightening flabby writing, and am cautiously optimistic. This could actually be fun.

😀

For those of you who’ve been regular visitors in the past, you’ll notice I did some housekeeping on my site, too, finally implementing a theme that would allow me correct control over my Information Architecture: My navigation now represents the hierarchy I had always wanted. I’m still not sure why WordPress behaved the way it did to get me to that goal.

I also started considering my blurb language this week. I think I have a start: “What is the mass of a soul? It’s a question that becomes more than academic for Mark Inman when his experiment searching for the Higgs Boson goes awry.” We’ll see how the rest of it goes as I finish my edits.