A very unorganized list of stuff I am thinking about on day 3:

--Another great day for the Divine Miss M. Retired Office Manager continues to work wonders with the cup. M apparently even started sucking on the spout this afternoon, rather than just letting the milk dribble into her mouth. And she doesn't seem ravenously hungry when I come home--glad to see me though. Feeling's mutual. Retired Office Manager definitely gets a note in the acknowledgements of my imaginary book, as well as MaDear, who came to help with dinner tonight. And R of course.

--We're doing writing exercises and it was fun and freeing to write on paper rather than computer. I love the compuer because I can type almost as fast as I think but I'm too tempted to go back and edit stuff rather than just write, write, write without censoring. Hmm.

--Blogging is a double-edged sword in terms of writing. On the one hand, it is this blog that got me writing again. It's a good discipline for this stage of life because it nags at me every couple of days, but it's pretty low pressure at the same time. However, almost all my writing is for the blog now, and that means I'm writing nothing "risky," nothing that's crazy and experimental and just for me. Not that everything here's polished either, but it's all for an audience. And yes, the real-life friends and family who read this are all trusted loved ones, but it's still all very public. Hmm again. Maybe time to resurrect a private journal.

--Along that same line, the "write the book!" tempters in my group wondered whether the book might be structured or formatted in the style of a series of blog entries. (They were suggested lots of different formats, like a series of "diary" entries, or a series of essays, or a more straightforward memoir, and I told them about the blog, although I didn't tell them where it was.) I'm kinda feeling like if I were to do this, I'd actually want to get away from the blog format. Young Episcopal Memoirist said she read a review of a book that started as a blog that said, "There was still too much blog in the DNA of this book." It really is a different medium.

--PPB wondered about the stories of the first generation of women ordained (in the '50s and '60s). Whether they are mothers or not. Maybe an interesting angle--then and now.

--This doesn't have to do with writing, but one of the pastors today talked about e-mail as a great pastoral tool. Yes, people can hide behind the screen, but people also feel freer to self-disclose sometimes. There's still a real bias of "e-mail is inauthentic communication" out there, and sometimes it is, but as someone who's enamored of the written word, I really appreciate his naming that.

--Tense shifts in memoir: Make sure you have a good reason for using one or the other, and for shifting from one to the other.

--In good memoir, omission is as important as inclusion--know what to let go of.

--One suggestion was to read several memoirs and outline them, sometimes multiple times, to see how they're structured. Even books that seem to "just" go chronologically will often have an underlying structure.

--If you're getting too discursive, too much telling rather than showing, try rewriting with an eye toward the five senses. Or, pick just one sense and write from that point of view. It might get you out of your head, and provide a couple ideas worth keeping.

That's enough for now. Tomorrow C and I will have our weekly Morning with Mommy, then a little writing, then off to small group, then tomorrow night it's dinner with the editor of Christian Mainline Liberal Magazine on "publishing."