Erato The Muses - Part IV

Erato is the Muse of lyric poetry, in particular love poems. The name Erato is derived from the Greek word eratos, which means the lovely or passionate. She is said to turn those men who follow her into men who are desirable and worthy to be loved; she favours those who write love poems.

She is something of a romantic, and enjoys people a great deal, particularly their humour, charity and warmth. She provides both inspiration and guidance to those who wish to explore various aspects of the arts, hoping to help them recognize their potential as story tellers, poets and historians.

Often being found writing romantic stories or poems, Erato is a bit of an idealist, always looking for the bright side to any situation. She married King Malos of Malea, and had one daughter, named Kleophema.

Erato is the Muse to call upon if you wish to write poetry or lyrics.

She is most often portrayed holding a lyre in her hands, usually with a wreath in her hair. Sometimes she's shown holding a golden arrow instead, a reminder of the days she spent with Eros, entertaining themselves by shooting arrows at random people to make them fall in love on a whim.

Melologue Monday

melologue ~ recitation with musical accompaniment

Wow, where did last week go? It went by so quickly and I have so little to show for it . . .

I was still deep in my funk last week - extremely tired and lethargic. Monday and Tuesday I did more reading than anything else, but the rest of the week I'm ashamed to admit that I slipped back into my old gaming habits, namely the Shockwave games.

The good news is, I was whining writing about this to a friend on the weekend and it seems to have snapped me out of it. I was actually quite productive on Sunday, and although very little of what I accomplished was writing, it was still better than gaming.

Yesterday was the Chinese New Year, so I decided to celebrate by making Chinese food for supper. While I like to eat Chinese food, it's a pain to make - all that chopping and slicing and shredding . . . I made the chicken fried rice ahead of time because I only have one super sized stir fry pan and I needed it for the chop suey as well. I don't mind fried rice re-heated, but I like my chop suey fresh.

In light of my fledgling healthier eating habits, I used brown rice in the fried rice and I have come to the conclusion that I don't much care for brown rice. There's just something about the texture . . . I'm not a big rice fan (except for rice pudding) in the first place so for the small amount I eat I think I'll stick to the white.

With Valentine's Day coming up this week I did something yesterday that's even worse than making Chinese food from scratch - the annual Valentine's Day cookies. *sigh*

The first Valentine's Day that my daughter was in kindergarten, I didn't know the name of her classmates to write on Valentines for them, so I made heart shaped, raspberry filled, oatmeal cookies on a stick, which she gave to each child in her class. They were such a hit that I did them the next year, and the next year, and pretty much every year since.

My daughter is all grown up now. She has a Masters degree. She's married. And I'm still making those damned cookies, although they're no longer on a stick. And she still gets people she went to school with asking about them!

Blog Stuff For the Week:

Tuesday: Part IV of my series about the Muses.
Wednesday: A new Hump Day Hunk for your viewing pleasure.
Thursday: Chapter 53 of Water - poor Ravi. He was so upset that Taja never got around to making her request. Maybe this week. ;-)
Friday: I've pretty much run out of office stories, so I'll have to come up with something else. Ideally I'd like to get my clothes closet re-organized, but will I get it done in time to post about it this week? We shall see.

Weekly Words

There are seven days in the week and I pledged to write 500 extra words per day, so that would make 3500 words in a week (look! She can do math! LOL). Let's see how I did:

New story idea: 731
Short story: 490
Nereida's journal (to be added in to Water during edits): 587
Total: 1808

Hmm. Only about half of what I should have done. Looks like I'll have to work harder this week.

I also edited about 20 pages of my latest book (which doesn't seem like a whole lot when you consider how big this book is), but I'm not sure how that figures in the word count.

And, just so you know . . . I said I wasn't going to count email words, but out of curiosity I kept track anyway and I wrote 5157 words in emails last week. Looks like I was in a chatty mood. :-)

Addicted to Office Supplies

I have a sickness. It's called: can't-resist-office-supplies-itis. I am a border-line hoarder of office supplies - paper, pens, notebooks, binders . . . One time I went to an office supply store for a pen, and came home with a colour laser printer. I'm no longer allowed to go to Staples without an escort, nor am I allowed in the school supply aisle of the dollar store.

Think I'm exaggerating? Here's a picture of the supply cabinet in my office:

Inside this cabinet is the following:
8 coil bound 6 x 9 inch 200 page notebooks
4 extra thick (280 pages) green steno pads
3 hard bound notebooks, 6 x 9 inches
3 composition books 200 pages, 9 3/4 x 7 1/2 inches
6 spiral top bound office pads, 8 1/2 x 11 3/4 inches
12 report covers ( 4 card stock, 8 plastic)
15 binders, 1 inch wide
5 single subject note books, 8 x 10 1/2 inch, coil bound
8 1/2 x 11 inch lined pads of paper:
- 13 white
- 4 yellow
- 4 pink
- 1 beige
- 1 grey
1 large stack of boxes and packages of coloured printer paper.

This list does not include any of the notebooks or pads from this stash that are being used or are lying around the house or are stuck in file folders. But wait! My stash doesn't stop there! This next picture shows more of my madness:

The top drawer is full of notebooks of various smaller sizes. You know the kind that are easy to carry around with you in case an idea strikes. It's hard to see properly, but the drawer below it is filled with packages of decorative printer paper for letters or printing poems for my poetry group.

In the upper right of this picture is a desk drawer full of coloured paper for the printer. The drawer above it holds plain white printer paper. The drawer below it is full of paper from a temp job I had in the mail room of a large corporation one Christmas.

When I wasn't fixing photocopiers or making sure people didn't stick their hands in the giant laminator, I was pretty bored. So I used the heavy duty copier to make note paper in different sizes and different colours. And we're talking A LOT of note paper. I even made sets for each of my sisters and one for an Aunt too.

Anyway, have still have most of this paper 'cause really, what am I going to use it for? Mine is mostly full sized with either a fairy, a dragon, or a spider queen sitting on a throne of bones on it. Yes, I used to draw at one time. :-)

This last picture is a stash that I gathered together for the purposes of the picture.

On the left are note pads that I keep on my desk or near the phone for quick notes. Not shown is the eight or ten steno pads, which have varying numbers of pages left in them, in a ceramic planter. These are left overs from the days when I'd jot down notes in the nearest steno pad and then rip the pages out. I'm keeping them in the planter in hopes they'll get used up.

To the right are my stick notes. Many, many stick notes of various sizes, shapes and colours. The collection looks more impressive in person. Ask my husband - the man who brought home a package of the long, thin stick notes in different colours in a nice case and then wouldn't let me have them. He seems to think I have enough stick notes. Go figure.

You can't really see my pen collection, it's in a gargoyle coffee mug behind the alien. :-) My husband owns his own business (with his brother) and feeds my pen fetish with the free samples they keep getting. And when the free samples dry up I just steal the ones with their business logo. Some of these pens make their way to the gargoyle mug, some my desk drawers, some my purse. The rest are scattered throughout the house. We won't mention the box of 14 black pens I picked up from the Staples clearance bin this week. ;-)

I also have an unnatural number of file folders (both coloured and plain), envelopes (regular, manila, and padded - in different sizes), and index cards (both coloured and plain). I don't just have thumbtacks for my cork board, I have bumble bee tacks, ladybug tacks, and happy face tacks. I have plain paper clips and coloured paper clips as well as more the heavy duty paper clamps (in both basic black and pastel colours).

My name is Carol, and I'm addicted to office supplies.

Hump Day Hunk

I think today would be a good day to sleep in, don't you? ;-)

Clio the Muses - Part II

The name Clio (also spelled Kleio) is derived from kleos, the Greek term for heroic acts, which in turn comes from the Greek verb kleo which means to make famous or celebrate. She is the Muse of history and writing.

Clio is both a scholar and a researcher and is often called the Proclaimer. She is credited with introducing the Phoenician alphabet to the Greeks. Clio ignites the desire to investigate and record, to give an account of events that have happened or as they are happening. When we record our past, we learn from both our victories and our failures, thus learning from our mistakes and being better equipped to plan for the future.

She teased the goddess Aphrodite for loving Adonis and Aphrodite in turn caused Clio to fall in love with Pierius, the king of Macedonia. They had one child, a son named Hyacinth whose beauty attracted the attention of both Apollo and the West Wind, Zephyrus. He became Apollo's lover and when he was accidentally killed, Apollo had him turned into a flower, the hyacinth, rather than allow Hades to claim him.

Clio is usually shown wearing purple, with laurels in her hair. In her hand she holds an open scroll or book, and often with a clarion (a medieval brass instrument similar to a trumpet) as well

Moorlog Monday

moorlog ~ deposit of decayed woody material under a marsh

Last week I mentioned that I was going to do knitting or crocheting or some other craft that would keep my hands busy at night so I couldn't snack. I confess I spent a lot of time looking at patterns and wool and more or less procrastinating until the weekend when I remembered I'd promised my husband a pair of slippers. So Saturday I pulled out my only pair of size 4.5 mm needles (4 mm needles, only the other hand I have five pairs of - probably because I did a lot of knitting projects that called for that size and it was easier to buy a new pair rather than locate them in my craft closet) and some nice, medium weight wool, and got to work.

Can we say OUCH! I know it's been a while since I've picked up a pair of knitting needles, but when did knitting start hurting my hands? Not Saturday, while I was knitting, but yesterday. My hands ached so much it even hurt to type. Hopefully it's just a matter of getting used to it again, I'd hate to think I'd have to try and convert all those Dr. Who patterns I downloaded over the weekend from knitting to crocheting. :-)

The week was a bust as far as getting anything other than my blog posts done. *sigh* But the good news (for me at least) is that I wasn't alone in my deep funk. Everyone I talked to had the same symptoms - extremely tired and lethargic. We couldn't decide if it was some kind of strange flu bug going around or the weather, which had gone from unseasonably warm back to cold again. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what this week brings.

The My Fitness Pal site continues to surprise me with the calorie counts and fat contents of some of the food I enter into it. The fact that according to my bathroom scales I haven't lost any weight has not discouraged me in the least. I've only been working on this for a short time and it just means I have to work harder. ;-)

In light of my lack of . . . well, anything constructive last week, I'd like to talk a bit about a new feature I'm going to add to my Monday posts. If you're a regular reader of my blog(s) you'll know that at the beginning of the year I posted a list of goals. If you're not a regular reader you'll just have to take my word for it. ;-)

In any case, one of those goals was to write at least 500 words every day on something other than blog posts and emails. Starting this week I'm going to keep track of the number of words I write and what I'm writing them on. Then I'm going to start reporting on these words in my Monday posts.

There are two reasons for this. One, I'm curious to see how much actual writing I get done in a week. Is it more than I think? Less? And just what kinds of things am I writing? The other reason is to help motivate me. Hopefully this will be my incentive to stop procrastinating and get writing. If I don't want to get outed for the lazy slacker I really am, I'll have to put my money where my mouth is. Or maybe that should be my writing where my mouth is. :-)

Blog Stuff For the Week:

Tuesday: Part III of my series about the Muses.
Wednesday: A new Hump Day Hunk for your viewing pleasure.
Thursday: Chapter 52 of Water - strange goings on in the compound, and Taja has an unusual request for Ravi.
Friday: This will be another post that's a by-product of my office re-organization. It will be in regards to my semi hoarding nature when it comes to office supplies. It will also explain why I'm not allowed to go into business supply stores - not even the dollar store - by myself. :-)

Notes and Note Taking

What do you do when inspiration strikes at an inconvenient time? And by inconvenient I mean just as you're about to drop off to sleep, or about to step into the shower, or you're driving down the highway during a snow storm?

I hear a voice in my head that sounds suspiciously like Dolly Garland of Kaizen Journaling (not that I've ever heard her voice, but it's what I imagine her voice to sound like) telling me "that's what your journal is for," (I also imagine her tacking "fool" onto the end of that sentence, but that's probably just me). But writing down an idea in your journal only works if you happen to have your journal right there when inspiration strikes. And sad to say, not everyone keeps a journal for that purpose.

My memory isn't my best feature and I know that if I don't write an idea down when it comes to me it vanishes back into the aether from whence it came. So whenever possible I write it down. And I will write it down on whatever comes to hand - the back of an envelope, a napkin, a scrap of paper . . . although I usually try to use a notebook because notebooks are harder to lose than scraps of paper.

I keep notebooks and pens all over the house. There's one on my beside table and if inspiration strikes before I fall asleep I'll turn the light back on and write it down. One night the perfect solution to a problem I was having with a story came to me after my husband dropped off to sleep, and I wrote in the dark. And yes, my writing was legible enough that I could read it in the morning. I have several pens and notepads in my purse and I have been known to write while driving, but only if the idea is really good because my handwriting in this case is less than stellar.

However, even with all these notebooks I still find myself jotting down sudden bursts of brilliance on whatever's available. In the beginning, a long, long, time ago, I would copy these notes into various notebooks. Attempts at organizing these notebooks invariably failed. There was no way to group notes together by topic because the ideas didn't come to me in a logical manner, they came to me randomly.

So then I'd rip the pages out of the notebooks to add to the scraps of paper and I'd end up with a pile of easy-to-lose pearls of wisdom that got stuck in folders marked "Miscellaneous." The problem was, these file folders also contained cards, photographs, articles, old report cards - you name it. The folders got stuck in different file drawers and I promptly forgot what was in there.

While going through the agony of reorganizing my office, I stumbled across almost a dozen of these miscellaneous folders and I went through each one, pulling out anything to do with my writing. But I was back to the same problem, what do I do with all these notes so I don't lose them? To be perfectly honest, transferring them to my journal or a notebook wasn't all that appealing, not only because it seemed like a waste of time, but I was also afraid they'd get lost in the shuffle, just like when they were in the miscellaneous files. Who wants to flip through pages and pages of notes looking for something that may, or may not, be there?

Then it occurred to me. Envelopes. I have a 6 x 9 inch envelope in a holder on my desk that's marked "Receipts" and its purpose is to keep all my receipts for the year together so I don't lose any of them. It works great. Why not do the same with my notes? I can label the envelopes according to their contents - one each for story ideas according to genre, one each for the notes for novels I'm working on, one for lines of poetry - it's perfect. I know at a glance what's in each one, and I don't have to worry about anything getting lost. I love being organized! :-)

How do you handle your notes?