Month: July 2018 | the Wakefield Doctrine

Six Sentence Story -the Wakefield Doctrine-

July 19, 2018 By clarkscottroger

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

Getting an early start. It’s Tuesday evening. This part of my process is all about getting rid of the blank page. Not all that likely I’ll write what you will read here on Thursday. But, for me, I need to dive into a pile of words and thoughts and images and hopefully find the combination that will make sense.

(Wednesday morning): …and, and! this approach to writing allows me to stumble over stories. No, seriously! I was out surfing for a jigsaw picture to start the day (thanks, a lot, Mimi.) and I came across the old photo above. It is of the Provo Woolen Mill. I have an index card* for textile mills in general, wool in particular, courtesy of my WIP, ‘Almira’ and ‘Blog Dominion’. In the former, the mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts figure prominently in the book and the latter, one of my main characters, (Orel and Theresa Rees), happen to live in Provo. So naturally, I had to read more about that part of the history of Utah. (Plus there was a voice saying, ‘Six Sentence Story!’ follow me”.)

Denise is our Host. The challenge is to write a story of six (and only six) sentences, using, relating to or otherwise involving the prompt word that she provides each week.

This week the prompt word is:

Habit

Cherysa Rees felt her son, Raun, lean against her legs clutching at the folds of her grey skirt like a sapling in a strong wind as the Rees family stood together on a knoll overlooking Provo Bay and Utah Lake; behind them, deceptively moderate slopes rose from the valley up to the rocky outcroppings of the Wasatch Range.

“We are a family of three-going-on-four, the farm is small and our neighbors are good people,” she spoke with a quiet confidence.

Ammon Rees felt a curious sense of responsibility accepting a position overseeing the operations of the new mill on the banks of the Provo River; feeling older than his twenty-seven years, he heard himself quoting scripture, “But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.”

His wife smiled, her right hand on her son’s head, a gesture more instinct than habit, her left hand over her midriff, “You are wise, my husband, the machinery you are coaxing to life will provide for us, even as we build a community to welcome home others who have yet to arrive.”

Ammon gathered his wife to his side, spoke quietly, the waves of her dark brown hair mingling with his offering temporary privacy standing in front of the new Provo Woolen Mills, “I confess that I fear the work of the farm will be too much for you, even with help from our neighbors.”

Cherysa smiled across the shade of the space they shared, her eyes on his, “The three of us will do as we must while you come here and prepare the future of your son and your daughter-to-be.”

* not-old Readers? like bookmarking a page or a site, except not digital…a little rectangle of heavy stock paper intended to keep track of references and ideas and such…

Filed Under: Featured, Psychology, the Wakefield Doctrine Tagged With: Six Sentence Story, the Wakefield Doctrine

Monday -the Wakefield Doctrine- “…of Writer’s Clubs and comments.”

July 16, 2018 By clarkscottroger

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

(I’ve called you all here on a matter of grave concern…..lol)

So Pat Brockett writes in a comment (on this weekend’s TToT):

I just read your Sunday Supplement. (You no doubt will laugh, but I didn’t realize that the Sunday Supplement was a real thing. Not once had I ever gone back to check the Sunday Supplement, and now playing catch would seem to be a huge task to undertake.) Anyway, I am interested in learning more about this.

(and) Mimi wrote:

Good list, good idea, a Writers’ Club. Or will it be a Writer’s Club? Each as an individual, or as a whole? My high school English teacher was good, she drilled it in to me to make sure.

(and) Denise:

I totally get the connotation of club v group. Totally.
How do I join?

All very good questions which I will do my best to answer as soon as I get home from work. (And I totally want to see Mimi join the Club, my grammar skills are somewhat anemic.

(Visual Clocks with hour hand and minute hands spinning)

Back.

So.

The Writers Club. A virtual hangout for anyone who enjoys the challenge that is always, (imo), a part of writing. Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, whatever. Writing, for me, is very much like playing a musical instrument. It requires effort to become proficient. And the definition of proficient is simply, ‘that which provides the practitioner with enjoyment and satisfaction in their writing.’ And being in a band not only is fun it is also one of the better ways to improve one’s skill.

This is will be interesting. (I am in a constant internal struggle with virtually every aspect of this process. It’s gonna be fun.)

Lets just start by ‘moving in’. The initial challenge will no doubt center on whether a blog is the best online construct for our purposes. It might need to be a website. However, since we haven’t yet achieved a consensus of the kind of activities we’d enjoy, I will repress my own tendency to ‘omg! gotta build something bigger and better’.

Everyone will be familiar with the structure/dashboard of a blog. Pages and Posts and widgets and a whole bunch of potential enhancements. At the present time I’ve got one Published Post (the boiler plate introduction post that WP does with every blog…with a some comment from me and val). There are two draft posts (part of my first WIP for a YA series, the Hobbomock Chronicles). You’ll see a number of pages with names that I really hope are self-explanatory. After all, this is a writers club!

So lets see what happens when we get inside the site.

As everyone who blogs knows, your email shows when you leave a comment. Let me know that the email associated with your comment is the one you prefer to use. I will use whatever you wish in order to send the invitation. The invitation will convey a ‘level of permissions’. I’ve gone with ‘editor’ with val already and I don’t see any reason not to continue that way. It is the highest level other than administrator.

(to be cont’d)

Filed Under: Featured, Psychology, the Wakefield Doctrine Tagged With: the Wakefield Doctrine

TToT -the Wakefield Doctrine-

July 14, 2018 By clarkscottroger

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

…Late start.

Thanks to Kristi for her continuing efforts to untangle the ‘Hydra of html’ that has been loosed upon her by the dark god, Inlinkz. (visual: wading through coiling serpentine shapes, needle-teeth scything the air with toxic whispers, brown-cardboard packing boxes held overhead, very much 1940s jungle thriller…’cept in the dry, high-mountain region of the country and wards-full of friends, none of whom will get all bug-eyed, muttering something about ‘bad ju ju‘ and run off down the suburban street.) Thanks Kristi!

Well… that certainly puts a modicum of pressure on this here list of Ten Things of Thankful, doan it?

1) Una: for being my role model.

2) Phyllis: for being my enabler (in a good way…mostly)

3) the Wakefield Doctrine: for sine qua non(ing) me in this realm.

4) the Writers Club: something new(ish) (you know I’m a clark, right? welll what’s more natural than my wanting to start a club? (yeah… that’s the non-verbal sound I made lol)

5) (it’s true, though. It will be a club and not a group… (first qualification for applicants! sense the difference in those two: club v group)

6) The internet and it’s associated technology: it widens the world and allows us all to ‘get a whole new group of everyone’*.

7) Lizzi St. Claire (nee Lewis) talk about your sine qua! She created this place in the ‘sphere. Not because it would become a cool place for people of good intent to gather and allow identification among very different lives to take place. No, she did it because…. And she did it alone. At the beginning time, when the Ten Things were simply a recurring theme among the posts in her blog. Whether anyone read it or not. Very cool.

8) THIS SPACE AVAILABLE (Anyone out there reading and really would like to be writing (a TToT post) but …not…quite….ready. Try this: send in your Item of Thankful as a comment (with whatever attribution you prefer**) and I’ll post it here.

9) Sunday Supplement:

So, about this Writers Club. My interest in writing is attributable to my decision to participate in the blogging community. It is, imo, a literal world or a literary world…or maybe a world of the written word. Of course, not that everyone in the blogosphere is obsessed writing. They are as good as is necessary to their enjoyment of this place. Speaking for myself, from the moment I hit ‘Publish’ on my first Doctrine post, I knew I’d never stop playing catch-up, in terms of my skills against the demands of my ambitions.

Anyway. The idea of having a ‘place’ where different people can try different things, writingistically-speaking strikes me as a good thing. We can share ideas, problems tricks and successes as we follow whatever our path in this world of imagination and ideas takes us. So I set up a site but I need to get it organized so that we have designated common areas and each of us can set up projects that we might want to try. I’m using ‘Pages’ for this, cause we can make them ‘private’. More to follow.

Oh, yeah, that and write a YA mystery series by the name of ‘The Hobbomock Chronicles’. So if you’re up for some interesting times in a tiny corner of the virtual world, let me know.

10) Secret Rule 1.3 Go ahead, ask. (I dare ya, I double dare ya.)

(footnotes)

* early in my days here in the virtual world, when everything was new and therefore risky, my fear would sometimes manifest itself in the most pedestrian of ways. “Hey, be careful clark… you’re getting kinda out there. If you don’t watch out you’re gonna get everyone mad at you.” I am totally grateful for the thought that followed, “Well, then, I guess I’ll just need to get another set of everyone“.

** of course I know how you feel! This is the Wakefield Doctrine!

Filed Under: Featured, Psychology, the Wakefield Doctrine Tagged With: relationships, self-improvement, the Wakefield Doctrine

Six Sentence Story -the Wakefield Doctrine-

July 12, 2018 By clarkscottroger

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

How is it already Wednesday?

Well, it is. That makes tomorrow Thursday and we all know what that means. It means that its time for this week’s Six Sentence Story.

Each and every week, our host, Denise, provides us with a ‘prompt word’. Our job is to write a story, six sentences in length, that involves this word. Then we post it on her site. (In the little blue rectangle that is labelled ‘Click to view and add your Links’.) Then make the rounds of the other Sixes. Pretty simple, isn’t it?

(This week’s Six is from the first of the stories in the upcoming ‘Hobbomock Chronicles’ YA series.)

This week the word is:

Explain

Walking through the old part of downtown Hobbomock, past the small shops stuck side-by-side like books on a shelf, their identities gilt-painted on plate-glass windows, Jacob William Hazard thought he might be in a good mood. He’d finished all his homework, raked the leaves and managed to get out of the house before his father could think of anything else for him to do on this, October-going-on-August, Saturday afternoon.

“Permit me to explain your weekend assignment,” Ted Berman said, one minute before the end of last period Civics class the day before, “you can write a ten page paper on the Electoral College, or you can…” he waited for the susurrus of unhappy adolescents to subside, “…or tomorrow you can attend our fair town’s Annual Huck Finn Day, watch the politicians hustle votes for the up-coming election and report back to the class next Tuesday.”

Standing on the sidewalk in front of his favorite store, ‘Tomes Tomb’ Used and Old Books, Jacob smiled as he watched the parents and small children in the park; ‘people aren’t that bad’, he thought, ‘they’re telling me their whole life story while maintaining a polite distance’.

Idling along Old Main Street, an antique convertible with banners that proclaimed,”Elect Bill McKinley, he won’t do anything bad,” and just behind it, a not-very-old man walked, smiling and shaking as many hands as he could harvest from the people on the sidewalk.

The man-who-would-be-Mayor, William R McKinley, resumed his very public stroll after kissing a baby held out by a somewhat nervous young woman, when Jacob heard someone say, “what the hell?”; from the corner of his eye he saw the candidate fall to the pavement, head hitting the road harder than anyone would let happen, at least without being unconscious or dead.

Filed Under: Featured, Psychology, the Wakefield Doctrine Tagged With: Hobbomock Chronicles, Six Sentence Story, the Wakefield Doctrine

TToT -the Wakefield Doctrine-

July 7, 2018 By clarkscottroger

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

A Backyard Attempt to Turn Back Time’
(Landscape Orientation)
The Corn Spiral grows increasingly visible as the surrounding lawn’s colors shift, ever-so-slightly from a uniform green towards the darker end of the spectrum. Without coming out and saying it, the change is the first microscopic signs of the autumn that lurks too-few months in the future. Like an elderly person, full of robust health, stopped by a single cough on a summer day, his future announced by a sound so powerful (and primitive) that it shuns the need to form the noise into intelligible words.
If we see the spiral as a clock, because, in a way, there is nothing more clocklike than an open spiral, Una is moving from twelve down to 9.
Being a dog and having a fundamental (if not formally expressed) understanding of life, she tries to turn back the progression. Her tail extended outwards, legs in a serrated-walking position under her body, it is clear that she is not running, simply moving fast. She knows better. The haste she exhibits is more for our benefit than her own.

This is the TToT (Ten Things of Thankful) bloghop. Kristi is our host. The theme of the ‘hop is gratitude. The twist is that we write, (and share), a list of Ten Items. These Items can be people, places or things that cause us to respond with, feel or otherwise exhibit the signs of experiencing gratitude. In it’s original incarnation, the focus was exclusively on the previous seven days. This convention remains in effect, however, it is considered valid for a list to be achronological* in both structure and content.

And so, this week’s TToT

1) Kristi for wrestling with the inter-wires that allow us all to connect with a minimum difficulty.

2) (My) Work for the challenges and freedom (of schedule) that allows me to write when I the spirit moves me.

3) Una

4) Phyllis

5) ‘Amateur Wordsmiths & After-school Detective Agency’ how does this sound for a title of a YA series?

6) Modern technology that makes this illustration of Item(s) 3 & 4 possible

7) the Wakefield Doctrine for aiding my development, both as a writer and a life form.

8) THIS SPACE AVAILABLE (Anyone out there on the edge, wanting to participate (’cause it looks like fun) but doesn’t yet have a full post (or feel that way), your worries are over (and imaginary). Send in your Grat Items and I’ll set right here at Number 8, just as plain as can be. Go ahead! You know you want to!

9) Sunday Supplement

Since this is a week for wordage (as opposed to photage), lets apply the principles of the Wakefield Doctrine to this week’s musical entertainment. As is the case with everything google, when you search for ‘The Doors’ (in general) and ‘People Are Strange’ (in particular) the result is a ton of stuff, information, opinion, cover versions, mashups and rants about the meaning and significance of the song. A lot (of the results of the search) focus on the ‘experience of the outcast and what it is like to not be included’. If you’re a student of the Doctrine, your first thought is, ‘hey! maybe this is a clark singing here’. Of course you then look at the photos of Mr. Morrison and you’re, “er… probably not.” You search for and find video clips of him and you’re, “yeah…pretty sure not a clark“. The Wakefield Doctrine is nothing if it is not flexible; this extends to how it suggests we apply it’s principles.

Remember the last eye exam you had? (At some point in the process), they said “Does this (click) look better than (click) this? How about (click) this?” And the optimist*** would switch the lens through which you were trying to read the letter pyramid. That is the recommended approach to determining the predominant worldview (‘personality type’) of another person. You start with an understanding of how the three types relate themselves to the world around them and look at something about them, in this case, song lyrics, and compare them, side-by-each. Which one is clearer, more in focus? In practical terms, the first one (of the three worldviews) to be discarded is easy, as in ‘no way!’ Curiously enough, people in the performing arts present more of a challenge, often having a performing persona that is seemingly in contrast to their everyday selfs. Jimi Hendrix comes to mind.

In any event, this Sunday Supplement is growing beyond my intent to discuss the Doctrine. (Spoiler Alert!! Jim is, categorically not a clark.) Will leave the fun of the process to y’all. If you have any questions, comments or observations, we totally welcome ’em.

10) Secret Rule 1.3 (“…the fac[t] of the completion of a list of Ten Items constitutes a valid Item of Thankful ( ‘Et in ipso’ ) and may be, by convention and tradition, be used as the Tenth Thankful (of said List).” ibid. op. cit. Book of Secret Rules (aka Secret Book of Rules) 2013-2018.

* I was pleasantly surprised to find that ‘achronological’ is a ‘real’ word. Kinda. At least it’s listed in wikipedia. Remember Neverland and the Lost Boys? I suspect there are corners of the internet that corresponds to that except it’s populated by clarks (male and female) and chock full of discarded, but interesting, facts and information in cardboard boxes stacked at improbable angles; wikipedia is kinda like that.

Here’s an odd choice for music: (from the Summer of Love**, The Doors)

** for those suffering from excessive BCD¹, that was 1967

*** couldn’t resist

1) Birthday Candle Defficiency