Good Ideas - Bad Ideas

Sometimes brilliant ideas occur to dumb people; unfortunately, most of the time dumb ideas stay dumb no matter who they occur to.

Case in point:

Yesterday I had a brilliant idea to tweak my Glog manuscript. Since Glog (a sentient dinosaur who prays for divine guidance in tough circumstances) eats muskrats, lots of muskrats, I thought it would be neat to use a muskrat’s distinctive tracks as a divider on the heading of each page.

How cool.

A bit of advice for writers: Change NOTHING in a head or footer once you have it right. Bad idea. Bad, bad, bad idea.

Picture the rigging of a clipper ship. If you change the tension on one of those hundreds of lines, you must also change the tension on every other line also or the ship flops over on its side and gurgles to the bottom.

Gurgle. Gurgle. Gurgle.

There goes Glog.

So I hit the handy, dandy undo icon — too many times. Word recognized that I was trying to do and undo and began to helpfully change things I never thought of changing. And it did it without bothering me by telling me beforehand.

It changed spacing, punctuation, pagination and God only knows what else.

So I spent much of the day undoing the redone done and undone again and again.

I am undone myself.

Does Stephen King have this problem with his manuscripts?

I was trying to get Glog finished so I can upload the file to a server in another state because Tropical Storm Ophelia hovers just southeast of Jacksonville unable to decide how strong to get or where to hit land.

I can tell it where to go.

Some guy in Hamlet, a play by some other great writer, tells the maiden Ophelia, “Get thee to a nunnery”.

Good idea.

I heard an anguished lady on tv question, “Why does God allow hurricanes? What is He trying to do to us”?

Here’s a thought. There were hurricanes in Florida long before there were people here. On his first voyage in 1492 Columbus ran into a hurricane. They’ve existed from time out of mind. Now, if I build my house in the middle of a railroad track, can I reasonably expect God to derail the trains? The Bible calls him who build his house on the rock a wise man; those of us who build our houses on the sand are called Floridians.

Speaking of hurricanes, Ginny is signing up for training to work in Jacksonville’s Emergency Management Operations Center as a volunteer. We already have our personal hurricane plans in place to the extent we are able (First Rule of Hurricane Preparation: Eat All The Ice Cream!) so she wants to do this as something extra.

That reminds me. Years ago we both took the Red Cross training for relief workers. The interviewer asked Ginny if she had any experience in handling crisis situations or disasters?

She told the man, “I’m a mother. I’ve put five teenagers through high school”.

He checked her off as Experienced.