more verticalssunrise (pgh) – 7:40

Finally a day with sun. (Monday was so gloomy that it seemed the sun never showed its face.) I went to the Mattress Factory and asked if I could go up the staircase and shoot. The young man at the desk was very nice and gave the green light. In the image on the left, I am facing north and Jacksonia. Again, I love the vertical lines and I was surprised to find the shadow in the bottom left.

Sunrise has shifted; it’s no longer coming later, rather it’s starting to come earlier – by three minutes since January 6.

The writing is coming along. The hardest part is understanding the correct punctuation when it comes to dialogue, so I bought a book recommended on a grammar blog I read. I’m also becoming aware of how often I use certain words. The awareness is forcing me to structure sentences differently. In the latest short, I decided that I would tell the same story from two different perspectives. And even though I’ve realized that beginning chapters need a lot more revision than later ones, having two different characters tell the same story also requires a very strict adherence to time sequence. I wrote the one character’s experience and then I added the second lens. I’m doing a lot of changes in the first character’s narrative so that the two pieces fit.

While in Sault Ste Marie, I took long drives and talked-out the ideas I was exploring and the character’s motivations and actions. This third piece hasn’t needed as much talk-out, because it lives inside the world I already created. But it is fun when I discover a new tangent. I added a nephew who gets a girl, he has no deep feeling for, pregnant and who then decides to raise the child while interning with his uncle on an organic farm.