Washington Stonehenge

This past weekend, I escaped to a weekend women's retreat in Molalla. The retreat was wonderful, but short on writing time. On the way home, though, I did stop at the American Stonehenge, which sits overlooking the Columbia River by Hwy. 97. As you can see below, I let my attempts at artistry get the better of me!

Stonehenge, in Maryhill, WA, has been sitting on that hill for 80 years. It seems strange to build a replica of Stonehenge overlooking the Columbia River, but it's actually a war memorial in memory of the Klickitat County soldiers who died in WWI. The builder, Sam Hill, was a Quaker pacifist who visited the English Stonehenge in 1918. When told that the site had been used for human sacrifices (which probably isn't true), he said, "...the flower of humanity is still being sacrificed to the god of war." He returned home and started construction on the cement, full-scale replica that same year. It was completed in 1930.


Stonehenge from across the parking lot...or do I mean the "car park"?


Yes, I warned you about the artistry!


More artistry.


The view east from inside the monument.


The view of the Hwy. 97 bridge across the Columbia to Biggs, OR.
...

Monday, Monday

This post will involve some rambling. I'm never at my best on Monday mornings, and this one is especially cheerful so far.

I vaguely remember my husband chuckling as he kissed me goodbye this morning...something about Baby M having taken off her diaper in her crib. Well, yes she did. When she cried to be picked up this morning, there was a special urgency to the sound. I soon found out why. Her diaper was off, her blankets and sheet were wet, and she had urine on her nightgown and herself. Lovely!

I put her in the tub and asked my mom to watch her while I stripped the crib. (Since she's nearly 21 months she doesn't need constant supervision, only frequent checking.) From upstairs, I heard a commotion and frantic crying. Oh no! I thought. She's fallen! She's tried to climb out of the tub and fallen and cracked her head open! I'm such a horrible mother!

Once downstairs, I found Mom holding Baby M, who was wrapped in a towel and still crying as if her life was ending. No sign of a split-open head. Turns out, my mother walked in to check on her and found both Baby M and Missy (the cat) in the tub. Whether the cat fell or was pulled, we don't know. Missy, of course, was scrambling to get out. In the process, she sliced one of M's feet with a claw. Between the scare and the scratch, Baby M thought she'd been had.

That was all about an hour ago. M finished her bath, and both Missy and Baby M are now dry. Mom and I put salve on M's foot, and she seems no worse for wear. I'm exhausted....and my day has only started!

To make this post at least partly about writing, here's an update. Okay, so I finished the rough draft stage of my client's novel. Yay for me! I'm now waiting on word from him to see if he wants me to do a final edit or if he thinks it needs more construction. My opinion is that it needs more construction, but he's the man with the money and I have plenty of other projects to work on, so I'm not pushing.

The self-imposed deadline for the e-book my husband and I are writing has blown past as of midnight last night. The really awful news, of course, is that the book isn't done. The good news is that I met my deadline plus some! Yes, I finished my allotted sections and took some off his hands. That makes me feel good, even if the overall deadline-blowing doesn't. It's obvious Melo wasn't in journalism class when my professor explained deadlines. Put succinctly, "Cross this line, and you're dead."

Can't be too hard on the my husband, though. He is working 40 hours a week, plus gelato, plus writing. On the other hand, I changed urine-filled sheets this morning...what is a fair trade-off, really?

Story Book Reader Distractions

This morning I found myself still distracted by a vicious (yet strangely satisfying) confrontation last night. It kept replaying…you know how it goes. “Oh, I wish I’d said this.” “Darnit, I should have told them that!” Built-in distraction. I could feel my blood pressure rising.

Fortunately, I managed to get my head on straight and start in on the second-to-last chapter of my client’s book. Oh, so close to completion! Still, distractions were abundant. Twenty-month-old Baby M insists that she is the center of the universe. I can’t quite argue with that, since I feel much the same about her. She brought me an electronic story-book reader that had somehow fallen into two pieces. Being the wonderful mommy I am, I not only fixed it, I also screwed off the cover and replaced the batteries.

What was I thinking?

I’m now inundated with an electronic female voice telling me to “Please insert a book to begin. Please insert a book to begin. Please insert… Please insert… Please insert a book to begin.”

In vain, I searched for one of the Sesame Street books made for this demonic invention. Nothing. Nada, Zilch. They’ve vanished. Yes, all of them. So, as I try to concentrate on plot and tension at the climax of this novel, I find a blue-and-yellow My First Story Reader shoved across my keyboard with the insistent reminder, “Please insert a book to begin…”

Where’s that screwdriver?

Ideas

Ever read a book or watched a movie and said to yourself, “Wow, I wish I’d thought of that!”?

Last night I watched the movie Julie & Julia…based on two true stories. It was a good movie but, more importantly, it brought to mind the concept of ideas.

Julie’s idea was inspired. She didn’t realize it would create the furor it did, launching her into a semblance of fame that was then compounded by a Hollywood movie. She was simply looking for a project to finish, something to give meaning to a career she saw as stalled, at a standstill. Her idea worked because it was original. It connected with people on a basic level. Julie was a normal woman, just like millions in the country, connecting with her idol and giving her life meaning through the act of cooking. What’s more important, she carried through to the end. She moved her readers.

Ironically, her success has probably created a surge of “copycats,” people who are now trying to make their way through some other cookbook, or some other kind of book entirely, blogging about it and hoping to achieve the same success. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but if I’m right…they’ve missed the point.

Great ideas are difficult to come by. Sometimes it takes a happy accident. More often, it takes intense dedication, insight and just plain hard work. Because of that, people who come up with those great inspirations (and who follow through with them) deserve the glory the ideas bring to them.

It’s far easier to copy another idea, to become a mere shadow of someone else’s great work. I’m not judging. I’m the first to admit that I have few, if any, truly original ideas. Most of my ideas can be summed up as, “…like this book crossed with that book,” or “…something like that author, but with elements of this author over here.” It makes me a little disappointed in myself.

If you write them well enough, you can pay the bills with unoriginal ideas. If you take familiar elements and rearrange them artfully, you can create a readership. Until we manage to capture our own brilliant concepts, we may have to be content with that. Bills do have to be paid; you can’t go bankrupt because you only want to write original ideas. That doesn’t need to keep us from trying harder.

I, for one, want to strive for even more. I want to strive for that “Ah ha!” moment, that idea that makes the reader say, “Wow, I wish I’d thought of that.”