Passive Voice, Passive Lives

Trivia:  Got the old man to do something new today.  After the farmer's market (corn, tamales, chilis, peaches, honey for baklava and other good stuff) and coffee, we walked down to the Poudre along one of the Martinez Park trails.  Lovely.  Trees, people, bikes, grasshoppers, dogs, horses -- all using the trail without crowding each other.   A nice quiet walk with birds and the murmur of 287 traffic in the background.

We usually walk  the Spring Creek Trail near Rolland Moore Park.  I see a switch in trails even though we have to drive further and no fishies.  Too much garbage and dodging bicycles.  

Comments:  Just plain disgusted with the whole narcissistic political mess.  Like my bumper sticker says:  "Invest in America.  Buy a Congressman."  Don't think it matters much which party's in power.

One comment does come to mind.  Somewhere I read: 'Invent it in America, manufacture it elsewhere.'  -- And the corporate goons think the American body-politic is going to buy us out of a recession.  Can't they see the unintended consequences of sending American jobs overseas?


Reading:  Finished Louise Penney's No Rules for Murder ... or some such thing.  Dinner Group is tonight, and I have to take it to a friend to read.  Not as much head hopping in Rules and some nice background on Gamache's life.

Have to decide what to read next.  Probably rereading Rutherford's The Forest.  Talk about telling!  I wonder if he could even get it published without major chopping now days, but history is seldom so palatable.  Besides, Salisbury is one of my favorite British cities.

Writing:  Not much is going to get done today.  I have to cook munchies for the Dinner Group. (We've been meeting mostly once a month for forty years now.  Our conversations have switched from diapers/babysitters to medicines/ailments.)

Emma's still on her hill, but I hope to get her off of it tomorrow. 

Tangled is still hogging my sitting time.  While it's the 'second' book I wrote, it'll probably be the most salable of the six if only because of the sexual politics intertwined with the civil/military politics.  Actually, it's rather embarrassing to read, but my critiquers are slapping me into shape -- catching passives, adverbs, telling, and confused sentences.  Back story is getting eliminated up an down the chapters. 

Have gone back to the title:  "Austel's Idiot: Caught in a Tangle Maze".   Yes, there is another one:  "Austel's Idiot: Dark Solstice".


Plenty of passives in writing this, but that wasn't what I was aiming for.  I ran out of time so on-going past action action will have to wait.


Progress:  Chapter 6 of Tangled is now 4200 words, down from 5900.  Talk about unnecessary verbage.