Groundhog Day!

It looks as if the Groundhog has some competition. I'm not sure what to think now, but I remember ever since I heard about this checking local conditions early in the morning. I always figured a ground hog where I was would be more accurate than one back in Philly.

I like Philly. I bought a number of souveniers there on my last visit and mailed them to friends in Croatia. The packages never got to them, or were stolen from the post office. That's the more likely scenario.

I've been trying for the past day or two to remember the famous "blue dot person." Years ago (five? ten? two?) there was someone who was testifying or something and had his or her identity kept from the public with a blue dot. I'm not sure if it was a trial or something political, and I'm beginning to think it wasn't very famous, either.

Tonight I watched the SOTU speech and the Democratic responses. Again I was struck by how the two parties fight, but, honestly, are very much alike in what they say. If I didn't know better, I'd have a very hard time deciding which party was saying what. And yet they each feel the other side is monstrous. Bush was arrogant as always, and I wish he'd have joined in for the applause for the Norwoods. I wonder why he didn't.


The Reader's Emporium continues to shrink. I hadn't realized how many words I wasted on descriptions. I may, or may not, do descriptions well, but I certainly practiced them a lot. I was called on some of it in an early draft, but no one complained about it as much as I think they should have.

One thing I realize now is that any time spent describing a setting stops the progress of the story dead in its tracks. There are people who do it well and I don't notice it in other books so much, so I wonder if I'm being too critical of my own work. Or maybe it's something that can be better balanced in other books, that some stories can carry or be enhanced by it, but not the one I'm working on. In any case, I continue to condense, distilling the story down to its elements, and I enjoy that process.

Of course, I may end up with another version that reads more like a Reader's Digest condensation than I'd like. My story of this novel is one of expansion and contraction, repeated. The one thing I haven't done, and no doubt should, is make any drastic changes to the original story. I've changed *how* I tell the story, but nothing of the structure. I wonder if that's because it was perfect to begin with, or if I just refuse to see its flaws.

But not very hard. It's obvious (to me) that I'm too fond of it to remove the panty theft, the road trip, or any of the other features. I still like it, and I'm hopeful others will enjoy it, too.