Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)
1) Surely, Phyllis has earned the Item 1 spot on this week’s TToT list, with her ’21st Century professional woman at work in a treehouse’ (eat yer fictional hearts out, Swiss Family Robinsons!)
2) Una was also hard at work,
No, I have no idea where the ‘work’ theme is coming from, this is, after all, Lizzi Lewis’s grat bloghop which invites all to gather, collate, briefly describe and otherwise list items and things, events and happenstance from the previous week (or time frame of your choice) and share it with readers and virtual passers by. Now, it’s understandable, her being the grandniece of C.S. and all, and hailing from the United Kingdom (England to some of us older folks) that work should be a re-current theme. But there you have it. There are no rules other than the secret rules. Fortunately for us, they are available in the Book of Secret Rules (aka the Secret Book of Rules)
3) gotta mention the BoSR/SBoR! They totally are my raison d’être (or would that more properly be cartes blanches ? wait! maybe …yeah! I’m gonna go with the cortez blanket…. ) the Book, if you find it, is a total treasure and should always be at hand when TToT’ing.
4) Speaking of work… in my work I get to drive around a fair amount. And who knows what you might see. I do! This is probably a bit Y Chromatic of me to post, but it was cool… even cooler in person, when you could see the whole thing (which was a portable crane that was about 60 feet tall, moving roof trusses into position in a condo, under construction…)
5) Shout out to my other favorite bloghop, zoe’s Six Sentence Story… I participate each week ’cause it’s fun and good practice with the writing thing.
6) The Gravity Challenge is going strong, heading into it’s second Autumn. Val and Lisa, Sarah and Kristi and our two scotts, Joy and Christine, are all, like total troopers, what with the photos every morning (except on Sunday).
7) Almira. For those of you following along, this last chapter had some pretty significant life events for our characters. (I won’t spoil the fun and surprise, if anyone is just starting.) One interesting challenge to my current skill level, is how to join the two timelines. One (story line) is pretty much Circe, Kansas in the Summer of 1939. The other… well, since this is the story of Almira Gulch née Ristani, we start in 1911 and, with our last chapter have moved into 1912. hmmm (you might be thinking, ‘hey clark… theys nearly 30 years separatin’ your story line… whatcha gonna do?) What I’m gonna do, indeed. Don’t really know. Hope the answer comes to me soon. Stay tuned though! This weekend Chapter 23 is due out! We left Miss Gale and Miss Thornberg headed to St Mary’s Hospital and we’ll be joining Sterling and Almira (and even, briefly, Frederick Prendergast) in the aftermath of the beginning so the ‘Bread and Roses Strike’ (btw this was a real event in history, kinda interesting)… but we will learn much more about our young couple and what transpired in the years between 1912 and 1939 for our young heroine.
8) the Wakefield Doctrine… resolving to work my way back to writing more frequently on the topic of everyone’s favorite personality theory.
9) so I was talking to someone about clarks and scotts and rogers today, and though it’s well-established that clarks really enjoy the vague allure of non-specific personal history, I mentioned one of my favorite odd memories from childhood. I was 5 or 6 at the time, I was giving a card to a family member (not sure who or what occasion… I’m thinking Christmas and probably parents). In any event, I recall that I signed the card: Clark Farley (which is funny, sure, but I distinctly recall that at the time, I took note of the fact that signing my full name on a card to an immediate family member wasn’t quite…. something. I did it anyway. I was, (and still am), very much a clark. I mentioned to this remembered observation to my friend, (she’s a scott with a secondary clarklike aspect), as she naturally she laughed. I then said to her, I said, “Damn! I could’ve written the Wakefield Doctrine on the basis of that one event, had I only had the insight that I had to wait a near lifetime to experience.”
10) The Book of Secret Rules (aka the Secret Book of Rules) states that ‘the completion of a list of ten items of gratitude does in fact constitute an item in and of itself and may be used as an Item of that selfsame list, conventionally and by common practice, Item 10′ op.cit. SR 1.3 [sub. 32.2]
* what’s not to love about blogging specifically and writing in general? I just realized the answer to my seemingly rhetorical question in Item #2! it’s Labor Day weekend on this side of the planet! btw, this jamais vu is surely behind my experience of ‘discovering’ connections between characters (and incidents) in ‘Blogdominion’ and now, increasingly in ‘Almira’… hell, if I knew writing was this much fun, I would’ve paid more attention in high school!
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Okay, so anyways, likin’ the list and…Phyllis is in real estate, too? How’d I miss that!?
Is that how y’all met? Haha.
Congrats on Almira!
I’m glad for the WD. Clarks…ahh…the way of things…
actually you did not miss that, as it did no exist to be missed, she is not in real estate she is the manager of an environmental laboratory*
hey, I’ve been thinking about doing a call in, I really want to hear people tell stories about their adventures in writing stories will let you know (if you’d be up for it, is there any time/day that would be better for you than others?)
*sure very sorta like a wildlife preserve for rogers…lol
Im jealous of Phyllis too! Did you link up? Thanks for shout….
Yay for the tree house and Phyllis working out there:)
Ah, I love those houses up in the trees.
:-)
I can’t see the photos of yours that you share, but I love to think of them, like the ones the elves lived in in Lord of the Rings.
Also, I love the history of Almira. Keep it coming, but I’m sure it isn’t always so easy to write it. You would never know, though I’m no fact checker, if you do struggle to come up with material for your storylines.
(not as multi-story house as I see in the pictures when I look up ‘elves houses in lord of the rings’) it is a nearly square structure with a single room. there are two door-openings (no moving or closing door, simply a rectangle cut into the side that has flat, wood board steps going from the ground to the door, the top of the stairs is about chest high, if you were to stand next to is outside. The sides are horizontal pine boards, a very light brown color with some streaks of relish brown from the sap rings. The roof is black asphalt shingles the have very slight (hardly can see them) speckles from their sandy surface. (I don’t think they use actual sand anymore, but it feels like sand embedded in the shingle, you wouldn’t enjoy the feeling if someone took the back of your forearm and rubbed it back an forth on the surface).
When you get up the steps the inside (of the treehouse) is an almost square. It is wider than it is deep. There are rectangle windows in the three other walls. They start at waist level and go up to where the roof starts. The are just opening. The wood is slightly rounded and wider on the bottom edge what would be the window sill (if they were windows and not openings) The wall opposite where you walk in has a window and a door. The door leads out to a deck with a single railing at waist level. The door opening is at the opposite corner of the wall than the door that you walk in through. Diagonal, I guess. The floors are all the same pine wood. Soft, sticky in spots from where sap might come through.
If you stood at our house and looked at the treehouse you would see it at the end of a wide clearing. The clearing is kind of rectangular (apparently thats a design theme around here). Not so much a corridor as a deep courtyard with the tree with the tree house at the far end of the clearing. The trees on both sides of the clearing are pine trees. Mostly small so they have that fuzzy, straight bunches of green needles look. The smaller pine trees that are at the edge of the clearing have an overall shape that looks a lot like pine cones, ovals with one end flat and the other pointy. There is a tall pine tree along the left edge of the clearing and it just looks like a tree trunk. It has no branches until you look up about 20 feet and then they stick out from the trunk. The clumps of green, thin pine needles are all at the end of the branches. Light a squirrels tail (one that had somehow managed to get painted green, that is).
The tree that the treehouse is built in and the trees behind it are deciduous trees, maples and oaks, mostly. So, from the house, they look flatter and more indistinct. The leaves are all pent-angular in shape, dusty green with fading from the season beginning to show. The trunk of the treehouse tree has a fork that starts about knee height off the ground. the one trunk turns into two and grow apart at a slow angle. Where the treehouse floor is, the separation is less than a foot. At the top of the roof, one trunk is about 3 feet from the other. The treehouse is build behind the two trunks. So when you see if from a distance (say the house) you see the rectangle of the door and to the left the two tree trunks. The first branches with leaves starts about 5 feet over the roof.
Its mostly a brown and green and the funny grey color that brown tries to be when it gets tired of being green.
Almira! Well, don’t be surprised if I message you about maybe a vidchat. I need to hear from other people on their experiences writing. As I mentioned in the TToT the timeline in the story is giving me problems. Actually, let me amend that. It’s giving me problems as long as I think I have to have the story complete in less than 100,000 words. Which is advice I read about the maximum length that a publisher will want to see in a new author’s work. (given the length of this comment, you’d think I’d become used to my… wordihood lol) Anyway. At the moment, I’ve decided, I need to the tell the story as the characters are telling it to me. So if it’s 135k when I type ‘The End’ then so be it.
I do struggle but only when I lose faith that I will continue to discover the story.
I’m just now getting my post published, and it is getting close to the deadline. I’m going to try to link your post–hope you don’t mind! Phyllis did a great job on that treehouse!
do not mind at all! yes, yes she did!
Oh, Phyllis is making me so jealous. A day in the treehouse to mark the end of summer?! What could be better?
lol she does enjoy the very notion of an adult’s treehouse
Not only is it Labor Day, but even better, it’s my BIRTHDAY. Which, coincidentally, it was as well on the day I was born, both literally and figuratively.