Head still swimming!

After spending the past two full days in a writer's conference, listening to published author after published author talk about "the craft" of writing, MY HEAD IS JUST SWIMMING!!

I've got great ideas on developing characters for my fiction work!

I've got to try some of these great techniques in dialogue like dialect and the concept of "voice" and the rich volume of unspoken information that comes from the simple, yet schema-laden language my characters use.

I want to examine the rhythm and cadence of my language (if I have that), and see where I can tweek and shore up this, that, and the other!

I'm encouraged that I DO in fact have a story to tell, and that I should definitely continue writing it DAILY!

There is just SO much to process. I took my moleskin journal and used about half the pages taking down every pearl (or dung plop) of wisdom I could, flying through page after page of notes scratched double-spaced and frenzied so I don't forget the FLAVOR of the authors' messages, much less the overt content.

There are questions in my mind that I want to ask and get answered by Rick Bragg, the Pulitzer Prize-winning, former-pulp-wooder-come-published author. He's so entrenched and proud in his impoverished Southern heritage (rightly so - and me, too), and I want to know how he reconciles the worst of racism that goes hand-in-hand with the best of what we love about our people. I know it must exist in his family because of where and when he's from, and I MUST hear his thoughts about it - through writing or speaking. Milam Propst, also, SAME question. Hers is obviously a non-impoverished upbringing, but Proper Southern anyway with the beautiful threads of our heritage woven all through the blanket of her life; are there the threads of racism there, too?

Coming to appreciate my Southern-ness, I embrace the "turnip greens and dumplin's" heritage that produced me. I want to know EVERYTHING about my family and write it down and preserve the treasure that is this close-knit, centrally-located, co-dependent family that with the future (hopefully distant future) death of my father will be gone forever. Mother is one of 13 siblings, and Daddy is one of eight. All of my generation, my 61 first cousins (absolutely true, though some are now dead) and I, are dispersed and see each other rarely - with only the most attentive of us actually knowing when we see another cousin (and even fewer choosing to greet them as such instead of hiding behind the tissue aisle at the Wal-Mart).

I'm definitely off on a tangent. POINT is, and I did have one, that I'm abuzz with ideas and energy. I'll probably need to "thoe back a coupla cole' ones" to get to sleep at all." The great news is that is was 'bout 78 degrees here in Birminnhayim today, not a freakin' cloud in that gorgeous, God-blessed Southern sky! We'll sleep with the winders open and listen for the crickitts and frawgs (but that probbly won't hap'm for another munth). OK. enough.