Thursday's my hump day

It's Thursday and I always think of it as the low-energy day. I don't know why. I think it has something to do with being a former aerobics instructor. By the time Thursday rolled around, I'd be pretty beat up. So now, I take it easy on Thursdays. Okay, I've decided I will try to be more grammatically correct but can't promise to clean up all dangling participles. I like things that dangle. I also like it when someone accidentally says something that is funny on two different levels. For example, when I said to my class, "If you're not going to watch tv, then we're not going to watch tv." I'm working on a comic book (very bad drawings) called Ms. Johnson Tries to Get Herself Fired. If you know me, you know that. I've been trying to write a story about winning the northwest aerobics championship and going to L.A. and being on national tv, but there you have it--that's the story. Keep getting stuck on the seamier underside and making a funny story into a sad story. Does that ever happen to you? You want to write something hilarious and it turns dark on your ass. It's no Alice Munro story, which makes me wonder if Alice Munro takes aerobics classes, you know, Pilates, or Yoga or something. (Sorry, my brain does that.) It'd be funny to have her in class in front of you and doing the pendulum. That's how I broke my foot in two places--doing the pendulum, remember that aerobics dance move? I'm reading this Writer's Chronicle article about Alice (Go Ask Alice) and it's talking about rhyming action in her work, and I'm thinking--motif, where's the word motif? There's some good stuff in there, though, about introducing some image and repeating it later, but waiting just long enough so that the reader doesn't remember the image, so that it gets imbedded in your unconscious, and then repeating the image where it's not so obvious. This idea is actually from Charles Baxter's book Burning Down the House, a collection of essays about writing that's just a really great book. I saw him read in SF and talked to him for a while after, a great guy--love the meticulous detail in his short stories.

Guess I should go buy some ink for my printer and print out that manuscript and mail it off to some contests before school starts. Come see me read on the 20th because it's all about me. Both my daughters have that printed on a t-shirt. Just kidding. I am going to get a t-shirt that says, "I Don't Give Directions!" for when I'm out walking. More on the streets of Rodeo later.