I want to start taking photographs like this again, the featured image by Nitish Kadam who shares on Unsplash. The pretty yellow flowers featured on the generationkathy header were captured by my sister who is an awesome photographer. She does landscapes for pleasure and portraiture for business and pleasure. I have a Nikon that sits in its waterproof bag in the corner of the entryway, prepped and ready to go for months in between outings. Poor thing. It’s fairly new and wasn’t around in the days when I was an awesome photographer. I want to relearn how to crop and edit, how to preserve digital images properly, take so many photographs that I need a separate external hard drive just for images.

Two of the characters that take up space in my head but not yet the page are photographers. One is a telepathic twenty-three year old whose adopted father handed her a camera when she was eleven in hopes that she might find some pleasure in seeing the world around her rather than constantly suffering hearing it. The art that emerges is ethereal, lucrative in later years, and remains an invaluable link to the man who became her dad.

The other also picks up a camera young. She’s a farm girl with a difficult family who eventually leaves home alone to attend art school in Memphis where she has a torrid affair with an up and coming musician after taking the photograph that becomes his band’s world famous debut album cover. This is the girl whose story inspired me to seek out classes and online writing groups in hopes of becoming a real writer someday. The other emerged from a prompt in my favorite online writing group. I want to write these stories down until they form gorgeous, fat novels.

I want to revamp this website. The process is underway by fits and starts with a new theme and header. Plans exist but have yet to be executed. The top three columns—I hope—will contain excerpts of my e-pub books, and all the rest of the “front page” will feature ongoing blog posts. While working on making a real website happen I am also researching how to properly build an email list in hopes of gathering a small-to-medium circle of writing-loving folks who want to share ideas and those flickering moments that will be forgotten if we don’t share. During this research I’ve found all sorts of software and web-based whatchamacallits that serve to help marketing yadayada. But I don’t want any of that.

There is a plan forming to publish my work on my own terms. In the midst of that plan taking shape, I want to build an email list on my own terms as well. I want to put together a crowdfunding project to finance a professionally rendered book cover from one of my photographs, an editor, distribution, etc., as well as build up funds to finance the work of my artist, writer, craftsman friends. Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding art aren’t new things but they’re new to me and the ideas behind it all, the potential results just set my imagination on fire. This. I want to do this. But I want to do it differently.

I want to find the magic that must exist. The magic that will defy and reform time into hours big enough to fit everything inside. This past week my coworker, my better half on the day job, took vacation and there was no one within the company willing to help out with all the unfilled workday hours. So, I was at the job 12+ hours a day for seven days, topped off by an 8 hour Saturday. And I whined/bitched/kicked the entire time. The house is a crime scene and there are two pieces of food in the fridge, and I wrote less than 2k words for the current story (that telepathic artist).

I slipped on wet concrete and fell down (HARD) entering work Tuesday afternoon. The incident was witnessed by men with horrified expressions who seemed genuinely worried that my language & motor skills were so endangered that I should just lie there and not try speak. In a surly voice I shouted at them that I landed on my knee not my frontal lobe so help me up already. By Thursday I was so tired and disgruntled that the full tilt and yarr of my southern accent was uncontrollable. The deli counter guy immediately voiced his notice of this fact and ruthlessly teased/mimicked me for the ten minutes I was choosing my lunch. By the time I left he was singing Hee Haw songs. Gloom, despair, and agony on me …

Bastard.

I want, I want … I am doing. The time magic things remains elusive because I just can’t get the math of it right. This morning I woke to warnings that my digital library loans were ending soon and I’d missed yet another pick up of a book on hold. With full realization that all these problems of mine are ridiculously petty in the running scheme of the universe I want to say they’re still real, big, and problematic. I should have taken more science and math in school. But there’s no time to worry over that now.