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!

the next adventure

Laurie & I before our hike up Guadalupe Mt, the tallest peak in Texas. You should've seen the self-portraits we took afterwards, we look awful! They are such a riot but I'm not posting them here! Ha!
Copyright (c) 2006 Wendee Holtcamp

I've been totally snowed under with work, still trying to get caught up after Hurricane Ike pushed all my work back a couple weeks. I am getting very excited about my upcoming camping trip this weekend! I am going to camp at Cleburne State Park with my friend Laurie (above) and we will visit the Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose as part of research for my book (Losing My Religion: Making peace between evolution and Christianity, Beacon Press).

Basically the guy who runs the museum, Carl Baugh, believes that dinosaurs walked the earth with humankind. Yep just like the Flintsones. And Noah had dinosaurs on board the Ark - less than 4,000 years ago. So obviously, I don't agree with what he espouses, since science shows the earth to be over 4.5 billion years old, dinosaurs to have gone extinct around 65 million years ago and modern humans (Homo sapiens) to have arisen in Africa around 200,000 years ago. But I'm curious to know why he believes what he does. Why do any of us believe what we do? How do we know if we're right or wrong? That is what my book is about. As a fellow Christian, what does he think of my acceptance of evolution? (I know from some of his writing he says there's no evidence, which of course is ridiculous - there are hundreds of thousands of studies of published articles including genetics research, natural history research, paleontology, archaeology, embryology, physiology, etc that all point to natural selection and evolution and the common descent of all living organisms). I've long ago made peace with my faith and science, but it will be interesting to talk to those who think differently.

So besides camping, campfires, and S'mores Laurie and I will visit the museum, I'll interview Carl, and we'll explore some other sights in the Granbury-Cleburne-Glen Rose area (southwest of Ft. Worth). I also plan to visit Dinosaur Valley State Park, which I've been to before a couple times, but it has some of the best preserved dinosaur tracks in the world! Some of them are in the shallow clear blue Paluxy River. I hope the water level is low so I can see the prints well.

It's going to probably be cold this weekend so I'm glad I have a very warm sleeping bag!!! But hey after camping in Nepal where I literally slept in about 5 layers of clothes, my fleece beanie, and my awesome North face down sleeping bag, I can handle it!!