I Heart The Mudflats

From Mudpuppy SMR in Calgary:

This blog makes my heart hurt, but also inspires me to be thankful. Don’t cheat — go to the archives and start at the beginning. It’s about the journey, for the reader and the blog’s author. It will make you laugh & cry, and make a home in your heart.

http://www.nieniedialogues.blogspot.com/

This has got to be the coolest wedding entrance of all time. I thought I’d share it with you but I can’t get Wordpress to embed the video. In that case, you’ll have to click on the link to see it.

And for those of you who are not only fans of Alaska but of Micheal Jackson, click here.

And in case you missed the Evian baby rollerskating commercial, click here.

Have a favorite YouTube video? Share it with us in the comments.

Here’s something for all of you out there who love words, graphic art or procrastination.

It’s called Wordle:

Click the image to see a larger version.

The site description says, “Wordle is a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.”

When my daughter was around one, I typed in the words that she used or that I felt described her and I printed it out. It is a piece of art that captured who she was at that age. To me, it is priceless.

You could cut and paste in song lyrics, magazine articles, speeches…

Have fun, and if you would like to share your creations with the rest of us, send the link or pdf to iheartmudflats@gmail.com!

From Mudpuppy Paula:

People have this romantic vision of a writer sitting in a smoky room, silk bathrobe tied around waist, sipping whiskey and tapping out the perfect manuscript. Winter gone, and with work complete, the piece is sent off to an editor who ponders the author’s great brilliance. Gasping at the amazing work, the editor quickly tosses tons of money to the writer, whose work sells a billion copies and gains literary praise from all.

The reality is that writing is a lot of work, editors are rarely impressed, the pay stinks, you often don’t know if anyone even read what you wrote (unless you spelled their name wrong, always a guaranteed response).

Like the image above, you can usually find me sitting in a smoky room, but in a flannel bathrobe, sipping coffee and researching until my brain hurts or calling twenty people to get one usable quote. After the notes are completed and the quotes are in order, I might be found lying on a front porch swing rolling the notes and words around in my head for hours until they come together in my mind and are ready to be put on paper. Sometimes they come out just right; other times my editor sends them back via email with a reply such as, “This is s–t. Do it over.”

Any writer (or working writer, I should say), has long learned to heed the wise wisdom of their editor. Editors are the Gods of the world of the printed word. They are indeed smarter than you and they will get what they want. If you are unwilling to rethink, reword, rewrite and rewrite again they will gladly find someone else who is (this is the reason many good writers never get published).

Yet writing has its rewards. Like when your column beats your mom’s favorite columnist in a statewide competition. I may be poor, but I got the plaque (wink).