Friday Photos: WriteOnCon and Weasels

In between some amazing sessions at WriteOnCon I had to keep sneaking out to the garden to harvest the vegetables that have pretty much taken over our lives.

On one of my harvesting forays I saw some brown blurry movement. At first I thought it was just the sun and shadows playing tricks on me. Something kept sneaking into my line of sight and disappearing.

I sat down in a chair in front of our greenhouse and this little munchkin popped out from under one of the raised beds.

Short-tailed weasel

He proceeded to dart in and out of cover for about a half hour. Luckily for me, WriteOnCon has great archives so I didn’t have to worry about missing something while I hung with the weasel. 

I got a few fleeting photos. He was a fast little sucker. Cute, too.

The little guy made my day, but WriteOnCon made my week. A big thank you to Jamie Harrington, Elana Johnson, Casey McCormick, Shannon Messenger, Lisa & Laura Roecker and Jennifer Stayrook for working the magic that made it all happen. 

All the presentations are archived on the WriteOnCon website. It is a great resource for writers. I’m not even going to try to pick a favorite, or most helpful, post or vlog or live chat. They were all very high quality, professional, fun and thought provoking.

Today I’m heading out on a twenty mile run with a friend in preparation for the Equinox Marathon. We both have some knee issues limiting us, but our running mantra is: Slow miles are better than no miles.

Happy writing, and have a great weekend!

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Keep Moving Forward

 

In Edward Abbey’s classic, Hayduke Lives, the book opens with a Desert Tortoise being buried under a huge pile of dirt pushed by a giant bull dozer. I thought it was some symbolic statement about the Earth being trashed. That tortoise was history.

I quickly forgot about the tortoise as the story unfolded. But at the end of the book that tortoise crawls out of the dirt and keeps on going.

Obviously, with writing it’s important to keep moving forward. Sometimes it might feel like you are going nowhere fast, like you can’t get your head out of the dirt.

But speed isn’t the point if you’re on this writing journey.

I’m guessing that tortoise stopped and rested in its crawl toward daylight, and maybe it even took a few wrong turns but it made it out of dirt. And then, it kept on going.

This week on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, I’ll be attending a bunch of free online workshops at WriteOnCon. It’ll be a great way to keep moving forward.

The presentations will be available on the WriteOnCon website afterwards so even if you can’t make any of them at the given times you can still check them out, which is a good deal for me since I live in Alaska and the Conference starts at 2 a.m. my time. Yeah, there’s a good chance I’ll miss the keynote address tomorrow because I’ll be doing this:

What do you do to keep moving forward as a writer? And, when you feel stuck, what do you do to get unstuck? Are you participating in WriteOnCon?

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