5 Waterfalls, 3 Beaches, 2 Rainforests...

So apologies upfront for the photo dump.  I had a hard time choosing which pictures to include, because we had so much fun on our vacation and saw so many fun things. 

We started out visiting the family in Boise where I got to meet my new niece, who is absolutely adorable.  We also got a ukelele serenade from Shay, Becca, and Hunter and had a great time hanging out with Tracy's family as well.

On our way to the Seattle area we honored an ongoing tradition - of taking pictures at the "bendy tree."  We first found this tree on our honeymoon trip 11 years ago and every time we've headed that directions since we stop and take pictures.  This was my favorite.

We also had a great time with Becky and Vashon in Seattle. Vashon works in the tallest building in Seattle, which has a great observation deck which he was able to get us in to see.  The view was fantastic.  Becky also navigated us on a walk to the Seattle Public Library and to Pike Place Market.   In the evening we went to Mukilteo to see the lighthouse and beach.  It was a terrific day and they were really good to have us.

Our time on the Olympic Peninsula was amazing.  It's definitely a place I'll never get tired of visiting.  We went on a hike to Sol Duc Falls which was spectacular, and went for walks in both the Hoh and Quinalt Rainforests.  The tree below is a Maple tree from the Hoh Rainforest's Hall of Mosses trail.

 

We also went to several beaches.  The first one was one we stumbled on while driving along the north shore of the Olympic Peninsula.  One funny moment was our cell phones pinging us to welcome us to Canada and ridiculously expensive global texting.  The second beach we went to was Ruby Beach, which was my favorite.  It had great sea stack rocks and was one of the most beautiful places I'd seen, and on this trip that is saying something.  We also stayed in Ocean Shores and while the beach was less impressive it did have one fun feature - the second picture below was my beach side car service provided by my cute husband. 

 

One of our last stops was a quick trip into Portland.  I've heard about Powell's books for years from so many people.  It's four story bookstore that takes up an entire city block.  We spent two and half hours in the story and basically looked at only 5 sections of the epic store.  I only bought two books, which felt like serious will power :-) 

It was a terrific trip, but my favorite part of it was getting to spend that much time with Tracy!

Not Bad

Every once and awhile when I feel uneasy in life I take a look and judge it by what a young version of myself might think.  (This started years ago after I watched the Disney movie The Kid.)  The surprising thing is that most of the time, from that perspective things look pretty darn good.

Yeah, she'd be irritated I don't have a book published yet and that I haven't been to Scotland or Australia.  And I think she'd be startled by just how many loads of dishes and laundry adulthood requires.

But as I mentioned earlier this week - she'd be pretty delighted by Comic Con.  By having a husband like Tracy.  By such simple things as owning a laptop with a Superman symbol on the outside and the fact that I can cook (or not cook) pretty much whatever I want every day.  The PhD would be impressive to her, in a way that it isn't, but probably should be, to boring old me. 

And my multiple full book shelves would knock her little socks off. 

It's a way of looking at my life and thinking that while it isn't perfect...it's really not too bad at all.

Geek Heaven

Today Tracy and I went to Salt Lake Comic Con. (By the way no matter what I do Blogger messes with the pictures and text so this post is a little messy)  It was a lot of standing in lines and crazy sensory overload and paying $20 for cold pizza and soda, but it was also amazing.  I've been in love with TV and movies and geek stuff for most of my life, so the kid in me was pretty darn gleeful about all of this.

Some of our highlights:

One of the few things on Tracy's Comic Con To-Do list was his picture with Han Solo in Carbonite - it's one of the first things we did .... he was a little cold though :-)










When I first heard about Stephen Amell the lead actor in Arrow coming to Comic Con I said "It would be so awesome if he did a panel...but that would probably never happen"  ....  well, sometimes you get what you wish for...

The next panel we went to was Shannon Hale and Brandon Mull, a lot of fun, and much lower key.  Nice to be in the same room with one of your favorite actors and one of your favorite authors in the same day.







One thing that was also a lot of fun is that there was a ton of awesome geek stuff there to buy, but we kept it down to a fairly respectable minimum.- Here's our small haul: a Comic Con Pin with a flying superhero, a button with the Arrow's catchphrase and a Doctor Who keychain.  The whole batch cost us less than lunch :-)   We also, at the last minute found some vinyl window stickers so our new car named "Clark" will have a Superman sticker in the back window.


























The other great fun in the vendor row was visiting Chris and Stacia at their HobbyTown USA booth.  It was a busy spot, but I did manage to get Tracy and Chris in the same photo.

And the last stop for our night (apologies for the repeat for those of you on Facebook) was a  picture with Stephen Amell.   The one funny random moment was that while we were standing in line for this photo, Tracy suddenly turned me the other direction as a someone brushed past me.  I turned and had to suppress a squeak when I realized it was actor Manu Bennett (another actor from Arrow that I'm fond of) 

This photo op was super fast, but Stephen Amell seemed really nice and I met some really fun people while we were waiting in line.   This picture also shows off Tracy's "Have you tried turning it off and on again t-shirt" which got tons of comments from people.

I'm not sure I'd go to ComicCon again necessarily, it was a long, crazy day, but I'm so glad I got a chance to do it and that I got to do it with my amazing husband! 

Rookie Mistakes

The other day I was wading through a few fanfiction stories posted online and I was reminded yet again of the fact that there are some hallmarks of rookie writers.  It made me wish that all of them, and anyone who is brave enough to take a creative writing class, could be given a little list of what NOT to do.  I'm not talking about the basics of grammar and punctuation that you learn in English 101 - because even I suck at those a lot of the time. No, in my mind these are the basic don'ts of modern fiction writing.

Here's my list:

- Don't include multiple points of view in the same scene - and especially in the same paragraph.  (This is my single biggest pet peeve.)  

- Don't go more than two paragraphs without dialogue or action.   (I think advanced writers can break this rule easily with no problems, but with beginners it's almost always a bad idea.)

- Don't  use more than two adjectives in a row unless you're doing it as a deliberate, conscious, thoughtful, careful, choice.

- When someone new speaks, or comes into the scene, start a new paragraph

- Don't put in a line of dialogue unless you've actually said it out loud to make sure it sounds like something your character might say in real life.

-Speaking of dialogue - don't use any dialogue tag except for "said," "asked," or "replied."  (Unless someone is actually getting violently attacked or something, then I guess you could use "shouted,"  maybe.)  In fact, don't use a dialogue tag at all if you can tell who is speaking without it.


Though having written this, it makes me wonder what kind of list a more advanced writer might give me.  I'm sure I'm still making rookie mistakes.

Writing Group

Today I spent over two hours at my friend Pam's house with our little writing group.  Granted a large part of that was spent talking about non-writing things like the fact that Pam and I are both giddy about the fact that we're probably going to Salt Lake City's Comic Con  and the strangeness of the fact that Die Hard is a Christmas movie...but we also solved  a major writing problem I was having this week. 

It was awesome - I had felt totally stuck earlier in the day and thought "Well, I'll run this by Pam and Jenny and see if they can help."  In about five minutes we had it figured out to the point that I'm once again excited to work on it.

Some people say that writers shouldn't talk about their writing...and I get that.  I wouldn't want to sit down and spin out the entire plot to someone,  I can imagine that might suck some life out of it.  However,  talking about writing, especially with my writing buddies, has never been anything but encouraging and inspiring for me.   And today was no exception.

Fourth of July and Random Geek Good News

I am a horrible, horrible blogger lately.  And it isn't like there isn't good stuff to blog about.  Tracy and I had an awesome Independence Day Weekend.  It started with a really fun dinner with Tracy's family on Thursday night,  Tricia came with Julia and we went out with Chris and Stacia and Talon.  I got to see Chris and Stacia's new house, and it's really cute.

Friday I was in my pajamas until 1:00, which is always a good day.  For dinner we went to our favorite local park and had a picnic, and the best part was that there was hardly anyone there.  It was quiet and shady and fairly darn perfect.

Then we lit off our own little stash of fireworks (I bought  aerials for the first time and they were all kinds of awesome) and did our usual tradition of watching A Capitol Fourth, which always reminds of us our favorite Fourth of July when we were in D.C.

There - YAY!! I blogged about something - there is hope.

On the geek front there were two really fun pieces of Arrow related news today -  Brandon Routh who played Superman in Superman Returns just got cast as a recurring character who is also a superhero (one I've never heard of, but still, very cool) and they're adding my favorite character from the show,  Felicity Smoak, to the new series of Green Arrow comic books.  Fun.

Funny Realization Moment of the Day

My friend Pam made me a gorgeous inspiration book/book art creation for my birthday, full of an amazing array of quotes and photos about books and writing.  And - because it's my book - a random picture of Superman.  Then this morning I had the thought "Well, Superman can be in there, he is a writer after all."   Yes, Superman's day job is writing for the Daily Planet.  That made me laugh - I'd never entirely put together the fact that maybe that's one reason the man is my favorite superhero - he's also a writer :-)