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My favorite childhood memory

Captain’s Log, Stardate 09.08.2006

Blog book giveaway:
My Monday book giveaway is BAD HEIRESS DAY by Allie Pleiter.
My Thursday book giveaway is A FAMILY FOREVER by Brenda Coulter.
You can still enter both giveaways. Just post a comment on each of those blog posts. On Monday, I'll draw the winner for BAD HEIRESS DAY and post the title for another book I'm giving away.

“Small kid time”: (I think only Malia will get that reference) Delia tagged me to share my favorite childhood memory.

Like I commented on her blog, my favorite childhood memories tend to involve blood in some way. Maybe I should have been a suspense writer instead of a chick-lit romance writer.

Okay, here’s a good, non-bloody memory. I absolutely loved when I was writing my first novel (an extremely bad fantasy) on our old Apple IIe. Does anybody else remember those???

I had all summer and the computer had been moved to the big living room, and I sat and wrote whatever came to mind. I don’t even remember the word processing program I used.

I saved my file on those 5” floppy disks. My dad got a whole box of them just for me. (Once I accidentally erased my entire file, but we won’t go into that because this is a happy memory.)

My brother scoffed while I was writing, but my mom, an English teacher, encouraged me. Finally I finished and printed out the 400-page monster, sticking it into a 3-ring binder.

My brother happened to glance at it one day when it was open on the floor. And he started reading. And he didn’t stop until he was done.

This is MY brother. The only one I have, with whom I don’t exactly get along with. That was the BEST compliment to my writing I’ve ever gotten.

Gone this weekend: Yup, to my husband’s cousin’s wedding in Los Angeles. We’re driving down today and won’t be back until late Sunday night.

So no prayer this Sunday. Sorry, guys. But if you have a prayer request, feel free to leave it here as a comment to this post.

TMI:

Writing: I posted another synopsis writing tip on my Story Sensei blog.

Diet: I had a nice surprise today. I was trying on dresses to see what I fit in that I can wear to the wedding. I discovered that I almost fit into an old dress that I love. It’s still a little snug around the hips—I could stand to lose an inch or two before it’ll look nice on me. But for the first time in months—no YEARS—I can actually zip it up.

Any old clothes you’d love to get back into?
Labels:

Comments

Delia said…
Not one drop of blood involved and still a great memory!

Have fun at the wedding! We'll miss you!
Fri Sep 08, 05:59:00 AM 2006
Southern-fried Fiction said…
ROFLOL! Apple lle? Cami, the first computer I worked on had to be brought into the building with a crane! We were on the 7th floor and they had to remove the huge 12' windows to crane it inside. It filled an entire room. The year? Oh, it was 1970. I was of course, an infant. ;o)
Fri Sep 08, 02:34:00 PM 2006
Anonymous said…
Hmm. Well, I can tell you that there was no Apple in my childhood. I didn't even understand the reference here at first.

The first computer I ever touched was in a class my mother thought she'd better take. It was Intro 101 to Computers on a Commodore 64 (is that correct?). We took a class together not long after my father died in April '83. She realized that computers were the future and figured she'd better learn something about them so that she could keep up with her grandchildren. So we took some basic programming. It was fun.

I knew my elder brother had a computer. A few years later he had a program for which he needed two computers. So he started speculating on the phone with me about how he could get two computers to talk with to other. Soon after that, he got a 500 Mb machine which could be expanded to 1 GB. Wow! that was awesome and it cost him something like US$8000 and had to special-ordered from somewhere in TX.

How soon we forget.

Have a lot of fun at the wedding. Unless someone gets very generous, I won't make it to the next one in our family. That's one reason we made such a big deal about Kathi's shower about a month ago. They'll be getting married in Playa del Carmen, Mexico--unless a hurricane carries it off before the beginning of November. The costs are $1500 per person, more than I get in a month and a half.
Fri Sep 08, 10:35:00 PM 2006
Anonymous said…
Hmm. Well, I can tell you that there was no Apple in my childhood. I didn't even understand the reference here at first.

The first computer I ever touched was in a class my mother thought she'd better take. It was Intro 101 to Computers on a Commodore 64 (is that correct?). We took a class together not long after my father died in April '83. She realized that computers were the future and figured she'd better learn something about them so that she could keep up with her grandchildren. So we took some basic programming. It was fun.

I knew my elder brother had a computer. A few years later he had a program for which he needed two computers. So he started speculating on the phone with me about how he could get two computers to talk with to other. Soon after that, he got a 500 Mb machine which could be expanded to 1 GB. Wow! that was awesome and it cost him something like US$8000 and had to special-ordered from somewhere in TX.

How soon we forget.

Have a lot of fun at the wedding. Unless someone gets very generous, I won't make it to the next one in our family. That's one reason we made such a big deal about Kathi's shower about a month ago. They'll be getting married in Playa del Carmen, Mexico--unless a hurricane carries it off before the beginning of November. The costs are $1500 per person, more than I get in a month and a half.
Fri Sep 08, 10:36:00 PM 2006
Heather Diane Tipton said…
lol I never even touched a computer til like 1999. with the exception of a couple times in '87 LOL

Yay on fitting into the dress!! I've done that a couple weeks ago with a pair of slacks. Also bought a pair of jeans today in a smaller size. :o) could have bought it in an even smaller size cuz they fit... they just didn't look good. lol
Sat Sep 09, 11:39:00 PM 2006
Dineen A. Miller said…
Great memory, but 400 pages?!?!? That's one long book!
Sun Sep 10, 05:41:00 PM 2006
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