Category: Inspiration

All That Jazz #It’s Six-Sentence Story Thursday Link-Up

As a kid, I loved to improvise melodies and harmonies on the piano. When I was a freshman in high school in 1977, my parents encouraged me to take a jazz improvisation class, which I didn’t like so much. It was held at the local college in a piano lab, a large room containing many keyboards, where students played, using headphones. We were given exercises, and the instructor listened to each of us and talked to us through our headphones, mostly telling us what we were doing wrong and offering little praise. He also insisted we listen to nothing but jazz, which, for a teenager who enjoyed popular music, didn’t go over well. I made it through the course, but it turned me off jazz for several years.

***

Thanks to Girlie on the Edge for inspiring this six-sentence vignette. If you’d like to participate, click here.

***

New! The Red Dress

Image contains: young, dark-haired woman in red dress holding flowers

***

Books

Twenty-Six Letters #Open Book Blog Hop #Wednesday Words

Welcome to another edition of Open Book Blog Hop. This week’s prompt is: “It never fails to amaze me that ALL the books ever written are made up of just twenty six letters.”

***

Actually, this doesn’t surprise me, especially since there are only twenty-six letters in the alphabet, a fact for which I was grateful when I was growing up. Because of my visual impairment, I learned Braille before being taught to read and write print. In Braille, a dot or series of dots stands for a letter or word. Some words like “and,” “the,” and “of” have their own symbols. Since Braille dots take up more room than print letters, contracting such words saves space. The down side is that after learning all the letters of the alphabet, you need to learn all the contractions. But the benefits of using Braille, for people like me, outweigh the inconvenience of learning a bunch of new symbols.

I started learning to type when I was in the eighth grade and discovered, to my dismay, that I now had to write out such words as “for” and “like” instead of using their contractions. By this time, I was in a public school, and it was important that I provide assignments to teachers who couldn’t read Braille without relying on my mother to transcribe them into print after I wrote them in Braille. So, I adjusted. Now, I write with both a Braille and standard computer keyboard and utilize all twenty-six letters of the alphabet.

***

New! The Red Dress

***

Books

New bloggers: Following Back

A while back, a new blogger asked me to follow his blog, or maybe it was her blog. With an unusual name, it was hard to tell if this person was male or female. I ignored the request. Although I follow some blogs that interest me, because I have over 900 followers, I don’t have time to read and respond to more than 900 blog posts per day. I’m glad that Beetleypete is of the same mindset. So, if you’re a new blogger, I suggest you read this. By the way, if you’re already following me, thank you.

beetleypete

This is some advice for all new bloggers who think it is ‘normal’ to ask other bloggers to follow back, once they have followed someone’s blog.

Try to remember that many of the blogs you decide to follow have been around for a very long time before you discovered them. That means it takes up a great deal of time to not only produce content for the blogs, but also to reply to comments, and read and comment on the blogs they already follow.

Imagine my own blog, with 8,000+ followers. If I had followed back every one of those, I would need to live five lifetimes just to read their posts and leave comments.

When we have been blogging for five years or more, it usually means we have already followed as many bloggers as we can possibly cope with. In my case, that is close to 120, and…

View original post 132 more words

The Bedroom #Poetry #Tuesday Tidbit

At three in the morning,

I’m mildly aroused

by the gentle touch of his hand.

He only has one good arm and leg,

still knows how to please me.

As he strokes me,

and I breathe the scent of his sweat,

I purr with anticipation.

But the mood is shattered when he whispers, “I need to pee.”

***

The above poem appears in the current issue of Magnets and Ladders, an online magazine featuring work by disabled authors. This poem is also in my collection, How to Build a Better Mousetrap: Recollections and Reflections of a Family Caregiver. Click here to listen to me read it.

***

By the way, for those of you who use the National Library Services for the Blind and Print Disabled, The Red Dress is available for download from their site here. No matter how you read it, please be sure to review it wherever you can. That goes for all my books. Thank you for stopping by. Stay safe, happy, and healthy, and may you always have positive experiences.

New! The Red Dress

***

My Books