not much

The wind blowing Tibetan prayer flags. Owl Mountain Retreat Center, near Abiquiu, NM
Copyright (c) 2006 Wendee Holtcamp

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. - Thomas Edison

Some days the words just pour forth, and I MUST blog, I must write, I must journal. Other times the well runs dry. The past few days I've spent a lot of time with short snippy snippets on facebook but not really something to say on my blog. I wish I could say I've been working madly on my book. I finished a draft of the first four chapters, which makes me very happy, but now I need to stand back and see how they all fit together. That is a bit overwhelming. Next I will be writing up my trip to the Carl Baugh's Creation Evidence Museum... and that whole chapter. Oh boy! I have the exciting task of transcribing all the conversations that we had, which I recorded on my handy dandy digital recorder.

I've been giving feedback to my writing students over the past couple of days on their assignments, and getting caught up on email. There were some emails I hadn't replied to from DECEMBER! Course I was spending a lot of time back in December with Doug... I miss that man! He calls me almost every day and sometimes the time gets away from us, and we can talk for an hour! It is all I have (except the occasional email...their internet is very slow) and so I enjoy every second of it!

Oh I wanted to give a shout out to a new blog for a new play: "The E Word: a playground adaptation". Sounds hilarious! http://www.theewordplay.blogspot.com/. I cross-posted this on my Fish Wars blog, but thought I'd mention it here too! I met the playwright, Sharon Sparlin, at the November 2008 hearings at the State Board of Education in Austin.

Also wanted to post a link to one of my past writing students website, Liz Soutendijk, Notes on Nature. She mentions my writing class on her site, and it has some great bits of writing and some gorgeous photography of her land. She saw me speak at the University of North Texas (UNT) Nature Writing Symposium in 2007 and then took my class. She is a master naturalist and got published in Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine! Check out Audio Tour Guide: Informative audio enhances self-guided tours at Caprock Canyons and Washington-on-the-Brazos. One of these days I should gather together publications and such that resulted from my class into a file! I think I'll do that after I get my book done. :) If you want to get published, and learn the ropes of the industry, I have a class coming up starting Feb 21! (deadline to register Feb 15). Contact me for more info or check out my writing course page!