Fortune cookie writing advice

My wife got this fortune at a Chinese restaurant and gave it to me:

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

That sums it up well, doesn't it?

Bisbee, Arizona Peace Wall

Haven't written with any consistency of late. This coming week my novel gets one final read-through before going to CreateSpace. If all looks well, I'll heave a sigh of relief.

Meanwhile, we've done some traveling. Here's something I saw in Bisbee, Arizona, a city built on hills.

Peace, everyone.

Out of the freeze and writing about the heart

We're thawing out from our recent deep freeze, with temperatures back into the 60s after several days of rolling blackouts for many of us. Yesterday a friend said this was the coldest he'd ever experienced around here since the late 1940s. We had a half-dozen blackouts lasting up to two hours each, while at today's writers' group one person reported a three-hour stoppage and another person reported no outages at all. Above is a view of the Organ Mountains from partway up "A" Mountain on the outskirts of Las Cruces.

Our writers' group meeting went well on a couple of levels. A relatively new member, Connie, moderated the meeting and conducted a 15-minute exercise on writing about the heart. What does the word mean to us? Some wrote about the heart as a pump that keeps us alive, and others wrote about the human spirit. Connie expected that some of us would write about Valentine's Day, but apparently no one did. My own effort tried waxing poetic about the faithlessness of my heart where it comes to writing projects, to not being able to keep a commitment to one project. It was hardly the stuff of poetic anthologies, but it was fun anyway.

Next month, another member will conduct a program about self-publishing.