Running with the Dogs

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Photo credit: d.koppdelaney

Hugh and Mina loved to run, and I might be in my early-ish 60s, but I wasn’t so old I couldn’t indulge them. The summer evening was dark, but still warm. Running felt like flying with 30 pounds of dog pulling me along. Old neighborhood, tall trees in the tree lawns, their roots shaping the sidewalk. No street lamps.

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Dreams Beneath Oceans of Fears

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Pushing the stupid rock.

Gapawa published a post today titled A Bit of Honesty. He likened himself to Sisyphus, futilely pushing a big rock up a hill only to have it roll back down for him to push back up the hill. Day after day after day. Gapawa concludes the way out is beneath oceans of fear where your dream — whatever that means to you — is carefully concealed.

“It can be reached. But you must be courageous. You must be willing to accept help. You must be strong enough to surrender.  Sweet dreams…” Gapawa

I left a comment.

“If you dive into the oceans of fear often enough, you can locate the shallows of experience where you can dream awake and put down your rock.

The first time was the scariest.” Me

He asked me if I’d care to share some of my experience, and my response grew into a post. With credit to Gapawa for prodding me to put it into words, I decided it would be more polite to publish it here than to fill his space with a post-length comment.

Here is my reply:

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Ready, set, go! … The backstory on 100,000 Poets for Change …

#PoetsForPeace is this year’s world event organized under 100,000 Poets for Change. Here’s their background.

The BeZine

100_Thousand_Poets_for_Change_logoThe Bardo Group “100,000 Poets for Change” event page is HERE. Beginning 27 September (tomorrow), we’ll post work on Peace and Justice for one week as our participation. We invite others to link their own work to ours and, although the title is “poets” everyone (artists, activists, writers, musicians, bloggers) is welcome. Shortly after the event, we’ll collect your links into a page to create a commemorative collection like we did last year for Poets Against War.

More details are on The Bardo Group event page. Instruction on how to add your link will be provided on this blog within the text of each day’s post. We have designed our participation as a virtual event to accommodate bloggers and those who are homebound or otherwise unable to take to the streets. At least one core team member will visit your site if you link in and we hope that you will…

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Enhanced by Robert P. Beus and S.T. Ranscht

Exciting times ahead.

We are re-submitting our YA scifi novel, ENHANCED, to an agent at her request. It’s been a long road from her insightful critique to the refined story we offer now, and we couldn’t be more proud. We hope you’ll wish us luck and send positive thoughts our way.

When I first published this post, my blog was 5 days old and had about 10 readers. I’m sharing it again with all the people I have come to know and care about here. If you’re curious about the actual story of ENHANCED, you can read the first 3 chapters at the Inkshares link. If you’d like to support us, please feel free to share this post with everyone you know! Thanks and enjoy!

Space, Time, and Raspberries

Some might call this shameless self-promotion, but until we sign an agent, who else is there to do this dirty job? Tomorrow, it’s back to the fun stuff! I promise.

Why was I going to apologize? Robb and I wrote Enhanced so we could work together to create a story we could share with people like us — people like you. We’re proud of what we’ve written. We believe it’ll stick with readers like good books do, and we dare to hope it can be a beacon for kids — and adults — who feel like they’re outside the mainstream.

So without apology, I want to tell you about it. But not about our “writing process” — in the name of all that’s holy, not the “writing process”! (…unless you ask…)

Since the beginning of language, there have been storytellers.

“Hey, do you mind if I tell you a story? One you might…

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