Eaton Hamilton

Hi folks! How’s everyone doing this week? I’ve had a great week in some regards, and in others, an extremely difficult one. I did manage a fair bit of clean-up around the manse today, and got in some Vit-D by weeding in the sunshine. Funny, that. How much Vit-D can you absorb when all the sun sees is your face and the back of your neck?

As planned, I finished the memoir draft this week, so that was wonderful. Anyone who writes knows how difficult the first drafts are. In fiction, it’s because you’re conjuring things usually from thin air. In memoir, it’s more that memory is the problem. I have a few very noticeable gaps–like, where the hell is grade five? A friend sent me this passage from Mary Karr’s “The Liar’s Club” today:

I too admitted it in the text, wrote around it and went on. I asked in a group I belong to if other writers had any tricks on how to break old memory jams, and there were an incredible number of generous replies and clever ideas, some of which I tried, but (so far) to no avail. I’m taking a couple of weeks off now to catch up on life–which means paperwork, accounting, gardening, cleaning–before going back into it. Who knows how many drafts it will need?

In other lovely events, I finished a 30×40″ acrylic on stretched canvas painting I’d left for years. I would take on a bit of it daily and over about two weeks, I got it. So happy about that!

The unlovely events will continue to have their outsized effects on living. Naturally the pandemic is one of those, with the foolish gets at the gov’t mismanaging every.damned.part.of.it, at least where I live. I’m very engaged in covid battling on twitter, if you too are irate by how BC is being treated by the PHO and the NDP govt. It’s open season on the vulnerable and children here, being cared for without PCRs, RATs, HEPA filtration, CO2 monitors, or even N95s. (Can you imagine the danger of N95s being banned for patient-use in hospitals? Neither can I. You won’t get treated if you insist on wearing one, here where we room covid+ and covid- patients together. Here where even HCW are not permitted to wear even their own.) As omicron version 2 surges.

You can join me at Hamilton Art on Patreon, too, where I’m thinking of hosting a free-with-subscription writing class. Love to have you along! Tell me what you want to learn!