I didn’t get much writing done this week. I’ve been spending time researching marketing, as I’ve been for the last few weeks, and thinking about more ways to better the work I have. I’ve also been spending more time on side projects, including work on a computer game I’ve been building since May 2009, called Entrepreneur: The Beginning.
Perhaps the biggest of my writing news comes from the books I bought earlier last week, The Rural Setting Thesaurus and The Urban Setting Thesaurus, which arrived at my house last Saturday. They come from the authors of The Emotion Thesaurus, The Positive Trait Thesaurus, and The Negative Trait Thesaurus, three other books I own, all of which I highly recommend if you need a quick reference on character types, character feelings, and setting details. I won’t get into the specifics in this post—let’s just say all five books are worth the investment—but I do hope to include them in my eventual writers’ books series, which I really need to launch soon. I got a raise at work this week, and the new income may make it possible to upgrade my phone in the near future to one that takes better photos, so I may wait until then to really get going. But we’ll see. I’m still reading through the introductions of each of these thesauri, but I believe they are helpful resources all in all.
The End of an Era
2016 has been a pretty awful year for me so far (and for others I care about), and not much good in general for most people it seems. Last month I lost the last of my grandparents, not an uncommon occurrence for someone who just turned 40 like me, but turning 40 is a big deal in its own right, and having to deal with both catastrophic changes in the same week is a little rough. Well, yesterday I had to say goodbye to another lifelong legend—the Schefflera tree that stood in the backyard of my family’s home and defined it since I was a small child. My grandfather had given it to my mom as a housewarming gift, and it spent the next 38 years growing strong, bringing both shade and character to the backyard. It was the bedside tree of my favorite cat, Sniffy, and companion to “Eagle Base,” the shed that my neighborhood friends and I used to use as “base” during our epic games of hide and seek. It outlasted the orange tree that I grew up climbing, and survived a number of hurricanes.
This week, my mom was told that the tree was causing problems to the drain field, so after some financial considerations (a drain field costs $5000 to replace), which included the cost of replacing the field every ten years, she decided the best course of action for the yard and the neighbors’ yards was to have someone cut it down. So, that happened in the last 24 hours.
I don’t usually grieve the loss of a tree. But with my grandfather dead, Sniffy dead, and the shed known as “Eagle Base” long since destroyed, I feel like my entire youthful history is getting erased. Yes, there are pictures of all of these people and things. But my memory gets worse every year, and one day there will be no more memories of that tree, or of the ways it had served its home well.
Well, except for this:
So, that’s my update for the week. Not much to speak about in the writing circle, but sometimes it’s best just to know how things are going.
Here’s a picture of the tree for posterity.
Drinking Cafe Latte at 1pm 