No, I'm not talking about my first day retired.  Though that qualifies, this tastes sweeter.

I volunteer at the Sawgrass Nature Center and Wildlife Hospital doing things such as helping with the animals at children's parties--there is a charge to the family, bringing revenue to the center--and going to outreach functions.  I love the animals and the mission of the Center.  It's not really about children and visitors.  It's about the animals.  Rescue.  Save.  Return to the wild.  Keep forever if necessary for the welfare of the individual critter.

The focus for native species--such as the Florida Gopher Tortoise--is to rescue, rehabilitate, and release.  Exotic species, those not native to Florida, cannot be released into the wild.  Look at what the illegal python releases are doing to the Everglades.  My favorite captive exotic bunny would also cause problems if he found a mate and didn't get eaten in the process.  SNC has a habitat area to house exotic animals and natives unable to be released.  They can live out their lives and avoid becoming part of the food chain.

The Florida Gopher Tortoise is a keystone species, meaning it is essential to the environment.  They are burrowing animals and share their burrows with other animals, many of whom would die without the accommodations provided them by the Gopher Tortoise.

A couple of weeks ago, I was honored to serve the SNC at the Earth Day celebration at Sandy Ridge Sanctuary.  We took a modest assortment of critters for visitors to meet.  Donna, the wonderful woman who runs the hospital, gave periodic talks about the animals, which I proudly displayed.  One of the animals was a Gopher Tortoise.

Bruce, the tall thin man in the video, is also a volunteer, but one with longevity.  It is obvious to me that he loves the tortoises.  On a weekly basis, he takes them out to allow them to browse for things to eat, helping them retain their natural instincts.  On this day, he asked if it were possible for our little tortoise to have his freedom.  After Donna gave permission and secured agreement from the sanctuary, an abandoned burrow was located, and Bruce got his wish.  I tagged along after Bruce and Donna with my iPhone capturing the moment.

The little Tortoise got his way, too.  

Follow the SNC on Facebook.

GEB

FMWA’s Florida Crazy Blog Hop

“Florida is a giant bug light for crazy people.” ~Phyllis Smallman, Sleuthfest 2014

It’s no surprise to any author living in Florida that some of the craziest stories we can write are actually inspired by true events in our sunshine state. Join us in exploring a different side of Florida than the travel bureau promotes with our first Blog Hop sponsored by Florida Chapter of Mystery Writers of America. Read on, click the links below to read another member’s view of crazy Florida, comment, share your favorite stories, and enter the contest to win a Kindle Paperwhite.

First, the rules of the Florida Crazy Blog Hop say I need to introduce myself to new readers.

I was born in North Dakota.  That is significant because you can’t get much further from South Florida than North Dakota.  True there are many places more miles away.  Culturally is another story, especially when you consider the fact I was raised there in the fifties and sixties, which would be closer in a cultural sense to the forties and fifties for you city folks.

After moving to Florida via New York City—that was a shock to my ND sensibilities—I went to nursing school.  Repeatedly as a matter of fact.  I didn’t stop until I’d earned my Masters.  That being said, the next many, many years were consumed by nursing and hospitals.

You can click around on my website to see my credits and long bio.  Thanks to my newspaper editor father, the drive to write is in my genes, but that’s not how I acquired the skills.  It took Florida MWA’s educational and conference resources and all the fine writers I’ve met to help with that.

When my ex-husband (I can’t put what I call him in a family blog) and I moved to South Florida, I was delighted.  I felt safer in a place where the trees were higher than the buildings.  I bonded with my neighbors, got a dog, and learned that Palmetto bugs are bigger than race horses.

Seriously, the first one I saw terrified me.  It was two in the morning.  I suspect my screams awakened all the residents in our garden apartment building.  HE said he wouldn’t kill it because HE doesn’t kill animals.  I killed the damned thing and awarded HIM a new name.

An interesting thing about moving to South Florida was that a newcomer needed to live in the area awhile before longterm residents included them in their lives.  The Floridians weren’t rude, just remote.  When I moved here--about a lifetime ago--exclusion of newcomers was an obvious element in the social culture.  For the most part, my circle of friends included other transplants.  I learned the reason was that after a longtermer made room in their lives for a new person, only to have that person go home and leave them with a vacancy, they became unwilling to repeat the process with the next newcomer.  After five years, I behaved the same way.

Several years ago my husband, Steve, and I moved to Tampa where we lived for a time.  We returned to the south, it felt like going home.  In many respects, we drove south to move north.  To me Tampa has a more Southern culture, while South Florida is akin to the Northeast.  

Over time, I learned there were many other things to fear in Florida.  Good ole boy politics.  Things that bite in the ocean.  Neighborhoods I can’t walk in.  Bigotry.  Crime.  Crooked cops.  Hurricanes.  Crooked politicians.  Growing old.  High prices.  Low wages.  Poverty.  Not growing old.  BIG bugs!  Land crabs.

In fairness, the list could be edited slightly and applied to almost anywhere.

I’ve also discovered there are more things to embrace.  The ocean.  Diversity.  Critters that wander our world such as raccoons and possums.  Nursing students.  Friends.  Co-workers.  Family.  Wonderful fruit.  Community spirit.  Good cops.  Honest politicians.  Growing old.  Warm weather to grown my orchids.  Friendly neighbors.  Adequate services.  An extensive writer’s network.  Convenient everything—shopping, gym, restaurants, clubs, schools, health care.

Again the list is endless.

All of these things make for a multi-faceted backdrop for living my life and writing my mysteries.  I don’t have to leave home to find a wide array of interesting characters, beautiful settings, kinky news stories, or willing consultants.

It’s all good.

GEB

Read on for other members' views of Crazy Florida

Victoria Allman, Gator Bites

Miriam Auerbach, Bonkers in Boca 

Diane Capri, Fishnado!

Nancy J. Cohen, Characters Too Weird to Be True 

Joan Lipinsky Cochran, The Million Dollar Squatter: Crazy in the Land of Coconuts and Bagels

jd daniels He Did What? 

Joy Wallace Dickinson, “In Florida, It's Great to Be a Cracker”

Dallas Gorhman 

Linda Gordon Hengerer Crazy Treasure on the Treasure Coast

Vicki Landis, Eavesdropping 101

Sandy Parks, Keep your eyes to the Florida skies

Neil Plakcy, Moscow on the Intracoastal 

Johnny Ray Utilizing Google Plus Air to Facilitate Author Interviews, 

Joanna Campbell Slan, Honey, You'll Never Guess What Rolled Up in the Surf 

I'm really not OCD.  Well, borderline maybe.  I sometimes have messy drawers, my closet isn't organized by color, I have a junk drawer (Steve has a junk garage!), and I tolerate the mess on Steve's desk quite well.  I probably haven't swept all the stacks of stuff into a drawer more than a half dozen times over the years.

I have a low tolerance for chaos.  Having a painter in the house is just that.  The thought of having the house torn up makes me anxious. 

First there is the whole issue of picking colors.  We went to Home Depot and acquired a Behr color deck.  I picked colors.  We bought samples.  I smeared the samples here and there.  Then I called my friend, critique partner, and artist extraordinare, Victoria Landis.  

The conversation went something like this.  "OMG!  You can't put that color there.  What?  Are you color blind?"  Okay, Vicki really wasn't rude, but she was pointed.  So, when she came to critique group last Thursday, she helped with choosing new, more appropriate colors.

That in itself was interesting.  Steve's business was fixing furniture.  He fixed finishes, matched colors, and generally made imperfections disappear.  He sees colors differently than I do.  "That has tones of orange."

"If you say so.  Who am I to argue?"

Vicki is the same way.  She see nuances of color that aren't there for me.  It's similar to a musician hearing things in music that other people may not hear.

Vicki told me a long time ago that I had painted the inside of my house white.  I thought it was beige.  Steve agreed it was a shade of white.  I don't get it.

So Steve and Vicki picked the colors while I said things like, "That's nice."  "Pretty."  "Okay."  "Works for me."  What do I know about color?  They picked two beige shades for me to choose from, Alpaca or Moccasin.  

To me, both colors looked beige.  No tones.  Just beige.  Light beige.  Dark beige.  Medium beige.  Okay, maybe, "That's looks a bit yellow to me."  The Alpaca looked a bit darker.  I picked that.

It went the same way with the other rooms as well.  My light green kitchen in now a deep sage, Cheyenne.  (Who names these things anyway?)

The blue I picked for my new den, office, writing room, and exercise space (treadmill) morphed into a soft grayish-blue called Silver Mist.  The blue bathroom became Santorini Blue, which is also a grayish-blue shade, though a bit darker.

The end result is that Vicki and Steve were 100% right.  I like the way the Alpaca picks up colors from the artwork.  My blue den is soft and restful.

Having the rooms torn apart feels chaotic and claustraphobic to me.  Steve knows that, so we rip the rooms apart first thing in the morning and put the days mess in place at the end of the day.  It has been hard work.  I often wear a pedometer (Weight Watchers goal of 10,000 steps a day).  Yesterday I clocked 11,000 steps and didn't even get on the treadmill, and I'm not doing the painting this time.  The painter, Phil Gagne, is much faster, better, and more tidy than I am--and he cleans up after himself.

The end result?  Beautiful.

GEB

Next week I'll be participating in the Florida Crazy Blog Hop.  It is sponsored by the Florida Chapter of Mystery Writers of America.  I predict it will be good reading, and there is a giveaway contest for a Kindle Paperwhite.

Of all the things on my Pay List, writing is the easiest and the hardest.  Easy because I love it.  Hard because I need to get it right.  It also requires discipline, which seems to have diminished in the wake of retirement.  While multi-tasking has always been a part of my life, I suppose now I allow myself to be more easily distracted, creating an increased need for organizational tools.

A couple of weeks ago I posted my budding storyboard.

It grew to look like this.

Storyboards by their very nature are cumbersome.  I remember years ago my idol, Barbara Parker, gave a talk on creating a storyboard.  She said she had taped all her story notes all over her kitchen cabinets.  I like the picture of that, but I suspect Steve wouldn’t.

I started the current one on a poster board like the kids use.  Semi-portable, except the stickies fall off unless they are secured with a bit of tape.  Previously, I’ve used my bulletin board.  Not so portable.  Once I taped it all on the back of the door.  Not portable at all.  The last novel I used a table in MS Word for my Storyboard.  Portable but cumbersome to reorganize or access in the middle of a thought.

I write on a 13” MacBook Pro, which is infinitely portable.  And I work in almost every room of the house, on the patio, and on the treadmill.  What’s a girl to do?

I sat next to Rick Wymer during the Florida MWA meeting in March.  At SleuthFest 2014, he attended a session by Chris Kling about the Scrivener content-generation tool for writers.  I had heard about it previously and had a total misconception about it features and benefits, thinking it forced the writer into a certain format.  Au contraire.  I was sadly uninformed.

Rick chatted about the program, mentioning that it has a full featured word processor and so much more.  There are options for writing formal papers such as a dissertation.  There is a totally open template, which appears in the word-processing picture below.  And, there is an option for novels.  It incorporates a corkboard for storyboarding, which is what captured my attention, and has a place for character sketches.

The software was originally developed for MAC, and while the PC version isn’t as powerful, recently major refinements were made to it.  (Hey, I have a MAC!)  He also mentioned the reasonable cost—by then I was thinking $LOTS—but the MAC version is $45.  

His enthusiasm was contagious.  I went home and downloaded the trial from Literature and Latte.  The nice folks provide a thirty-day full-access version (thirty contact days, not calendar days).  I saw something on the site that alerted me to buy from the Apple App Store for convenient updates, so that is what I did just two days later.  I started one file for my miscellaneous writing, which includes my blog posts and book reviews.  

And I started a file for Imperfect Obsession, my next planned title in the Imperfect Series.  I typed in all my existing sticky notes, have since added more to the corkboard, and easily rearranged the items.  Everything I included—character sketches/sheets, pictures, research articles, web links, notes, and chapter “outlines”—is accessible from within the program.  I'm so excited.

Now I have a poster board that only holds a map of my fictitious city.

Anybody need a fresh, hardly ever used storyboard?

GEB