Linguistic Liability

Not sure what has happened, but my favorite group on Yahoo, CONPO, has disappeared. CONPO was a listing of writing contests and requests for submissions. Now I must search for new online friends and lists myself. Sigh.

This makes me a little happier... "Company hopes to fill niche with new poetry quarterly" - maybe some of us writers will have a chance after all!

If you're ever looking for an extensive list of women writes, a good place to start with is the Celebration of Woman Writers website. Their statement of purpose says, "Our goal is to promote awareness of the breadth and variety of women's writing." If you look under their link Authors & Books, you will find a very well-organized listing of female authors by name, date, and country.

Here's a heads up on a good resource for writers wanting to find submission sites... go to the Yahoo group Conpo . This group is solely dedicated to posting notices of contests and calls for submissions for all writing genres.

Well, the Aardvark of Freedom is up and running with at last count, seven blogs and a lot of unique perspectives on life. Let the good times begin!

Coming soon to your personal space called a browser window, it's The Aardvark of Freedom (currently in beta mode).
What it will become is up to God, a group of friends, and the length of a very long tongue.

Some notes about writing... I have this theory that when I get a writing idea, I have to put it onto paper immediately or the idea will disapear. I also feel like I have to write the entire piece, no matter how long it is, in one entire sitting. This last writing quirk is not always feasable, so I tend to do the minimum of other activities while writing. However, Saturday proved to be an exception to this norm. While I wrote four pages of a continuing short story, I also made and preserved apple butter and blackberry jelly, two very sticky projects. The good news is that I didn't get my keyboard sticky, and all the jars sealed!

Today, I'm asking myself "Why did God bother with chiggers?" It's the same question with ticks and cockroaches. Why did the Creator take time out from the rest of his creatorial duties to make these pests?

I went blackberry picking Sunday, a recreational activity that results in sweet berries by the handfulls, thorns stuck in fingers and hands, and chiggers on any area of the skin covered by tight clothing and no bug spray - like my waist, for example. I sprayed myself everywhere but my waistband, and now I currently have about thirty or more chigger bites on my torso. I'm still digging thorns out of my fingers too.

I love blackberries. I love them a lot when the berries go on sale at the grocery store and I can pick them up off the display and deposit them in my shopping cart. However, I'm not sure what I think about actually working for my berries - trudging through knee-high weeds to the blackberry bushes, menacing with their thorns and bugs and holding their best fruit in the center of the bushes where I have to lean in through the negative elements to reach the prized squishable berries.

Oh well, the chiggers thank me for my time and my plasma donations.