Thursday thoughts

1. Thanks to my husband for letting me sleep in this morning. That is no small thing!



2. I'm feeling very self-conscious wearing my Chuy's "Texas Proud" t-shirt in Florida, even though I'm home with no one but my son to see me. I put it on because it was the first clean short-sleeved shirt I could find (it's 76 degrees at the moment), and it's Texas Independence Day.



3. I may change shirts before I go out (maybe into a University of Texas one...), but I dug out a Texas-shaped cake pan I bought before moving, and will probably make a Texas cake for the holiday. Amusingly, I've heard a lot about Texas Independence Day, which celebrates Texas' independence from Mexico in 1836, but I've never heard a word about its statehood day & have no idea when that is!



4. Speaking of holidays, my husband's company gives employees the day off on March 4th, so they can "march forth" with whatever they'd like to pursue in their personal lives that day. I think it's way cool to have a holiday just because of a play on words. Since March 4th is a Saturday this year, he's off tomorrow instead. Cool! (And Sunday is his birthday.)



5. I need to work on becoming a better storyteller. I usually like my writing, paragraph by paragaph or page by page, but I'm not sure I have enough stories to tell. Not the kind that rivet you so you have to find out what happens. As a reader, I don't mind stories that are light on plot, when they're interesting as character studies and vignettes, or just have amusing writing, but that's not what's selling. A while back, I read an interview with Jeanne DuPrau, who mentioned studying the Harry Potter books and noticing the characters were always active. She rewrote The City of Ember to make the characters more active, and had a much easier time selling it. I'm trying to take that to heart, though it's not my natural bent!



6. It really bugs me that putting an ordered list in this blog automatically adds extra blank lines above & below the list, so it doesn't match the formatting of my other blog entries. I've decided to just register my dissatisfaction here instead of spending another hour trying to tweak the formatting like I normally would!