I did it! From a miserable performance yesterday I soared into mediocrity and passed the PADI scuba class! I am so very pleased with myself. Really. I did it!
I’m taking the intro course to scuba dive and I’m having a terrible time. Tomorrow I’m supposed to try again to stay down and calm and do the fin pivot thing. I do not want to. I don’t know why I can’t do this. I can’t get enough air, I over breathe, and then I’m too buoyant. My suit was too much. I’m trying to calm myself and visualize myself down at the bottom of the pool with It’s A Wonderful Life running through my head. My teeth hurt from using the regulator all afternoon. I’m just scared, I guess. I have little experience with being scared. Maybe if Louis Armstrong would hold my hand and sing to me the whole time. Maybe I’ll be more courageous in the morning. Ya’ll sing for me, okay?
Just read an article in the New York Times about why authors Twitter. Some use it strictly as a means of promotion: announcements of new books, signings, tours. Some use Twitters to be in touch with readers in a more familiar way, to make readers feel they are all friends. Not that those authors aren’t sincerely interested in their readers and in knowing each other. And some Twitters are gregarious and like the back and forth of the process and actually have interesting bits to share. Like the Twitter I just reposted from @Darin Strauss about God and black holes and Tim Tebow. Now if I thought of interesting little 140 character nuggets like that one, I’d be twittering all the time, too.
Sadly, lots of us authors are, however talented in some ways, not good at the Darin Strauss constructions. Some of us are introverted or shy enough that even interaction through electronic media is a little iffy. Don’t wish to evoke the author as recluse in the attic image, but there is a smidge of truth to it. Maybe it’s also partly a generational thing. I’m old enough that all this electronic media makes me feel like there is a swarm of bees buzzing my head. My phone will take pictures, which is miraculous, but I don’t need my phone to take pictures. I never remember it will do it if an occasion for pictures arises. And the main factor for me is that I imagine the millions of people out there engaging in electronic media and feel overwhelmed and inadequate. So I guess this is a post about why I don’t post more. It’s because I’m introverted, old enough to remember Ma Bell and party lines with nostalgia, and also because I’m so very humble, and of course proud of that.
@DarinStrauss Scientists find black holes 10 billion times bigger than the sun. Yet God still takes time to help Tim Tebow win every week.
This is so cool. You can borrow books from Amazon on your Kindle now. I don’t want to sound like a commercial, but if you sign up for Amazon Prime ($79/year) you can borrow one book a month with no due date, which I take to mean they’re basically giving you one book a month. Plus free shipping on paper books. I’m going to use this borrowing thing a lot — well, once a month. By the way, you can borrow three of my titles on Amazon Prime, too — just type in Gretchen Craig.
Went to the mall. Saw all the crazy people shopping as if that were what this is all about. Know people stressing out over menus, gifts, wrapping paper. So here’s my wish for all of you for Christmas. YA’LL RELAX. Happy Holidays.
Here I am, gray hair attesting to at least a chronological maturity, yet I still have the impulse to show mommy my pretty drawing and have her put it on the refrigerator door. Does that pitiful need for approval ever go away? I’ve been writing for nine years, have published novels and written a bunch more that are not yet published, and still, I write a scene that seems to sing, and I want to show it to somebody. They’ll be so impressed, so proud of me, they’ll tell me it’s wonderful and put a gold star in the top right corner.
Kind of pitiful. Especially when you consider that this impulse occurs immediately after the first draft of that scene. I know very well that in a few hours or days I’ll look it over again and smack myself in the forehead. This thing needs revisions, big time. So I’ll fix it and wish again I could show it to an adoring someone who’ll pat me on the back and say Good Job.
Some people hire secretaries and assistants to help them with research and what not. Maybe I should hire someone to sit in the next room until I’m ready for praise and cookies. She, or he, would then come in and read my pages and murmur or chuckle and then pronounce me a very clever girl indeed. What’s the going rate for a grandmother these days?
