The Thousand Islands Writers Festival Storefront Writing Contest will be taking place on August 27, 2011 at various locations along King Street in downtown Brockville.

Dorothy Bush and I approached the festival committee last November with our idea (borrowed from an annual contest held in Bruton, England) and they enthusiastically embraced the idea.

So what makes this contest so different? Well, you’ll get to see the writers working feverishly at their laptops or with pen and paper whilst they sit in the storefronts and write a story of up to 2000 words between 10:00 am and 4:00 pm when everyone will stop writing and make their way to the drop location.

Everyone will receive the same prompt/theme/first line so we’ll all be writing on the same topic. The organizers will select the topic that day so no one has any advance notice of what it will be. The contestants will draw the location where they’ll be writing from a hat. There will be at least two people writing at every location. Writing is a solitary venture so being with another like-minded person hopefully will help generate some good writing vibes.

Now, we’re not done yet. Contestants will be writing under a pseudonym so if you have always fancied yourself as being the next Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Bram Stoker etc…, you’ll get your chance.

Watch this blog and the Thousand Islands Writers Festival website for updates as the contest time draws nearer.

Just home from the concert. WOW! Great time. Even at the young age of 72, he can still hit the high notes. I didn’t take a camera with me because at some concerts, you can’t take them in and I didn’t want to run the risk of having it confiscated.

Didn’t even take my purse so my wee Kodak that I carry everywhere with me stayed home. However, all was not lost. I had my Blackberry with me and managed to get some reasonably decent pics, with it.

The only downside to the concert was the people who sat directly behind us never stopped talking all night! I was tempted a few times to tell them to shut the f$%k up but I would have been the one kicked out. Not part of my master plan so I tuned them out (as best I could). It was quite the relief when they left partway through the second set.

Off to see Gordon Lightfoot tomorrow night. Have thought about it since the posters first went up. Mentioned it to the hubby last night and he bougth our tickets today. Told me he’d been thinking about it, too. What can I say, great minds think alike.

Should be a good evening… and even more importantly, a night out for just the two of us.

Back in early January, I received a brochure from the local bus company with their 2011 tours. The last weekend in May caught my eye. It was exactly the trip my girlfriend from Kingston and I had planned on doing for years. Niagara Falls and tour some wineries. I tore that page out the brochure, scanned it and e-mailed it to her. It was agreed, we would go.

A couple of days later, I booked our vacation and we began planning what we would do in our free time. Until the trip hit my credit card and even from then until the invoice arrived, the whole thing seemed totally surreal.

Then on May 5th, the unthinkable happened! The trip was cancelled. Only twelve people (including the two of us) had signed up.

What can I say, we were handed lemons. But, what do you when life hands you lemons? You make lemonade. A couple of quick text messages back and forth and we decided we would still do it but on our own.

So by May 6th, I had a room booked for the two nights at the same hotel my husband and I used the year my friend from Wales came over and we were tentatively booked on Grape and Wine Tours Best Kept Secret Dinner Tour (wine tour with tastings and 3 course gourmet meal at an undisclosed restaurant) on the Saturday. They come and pick us up at our hotel and bring us back afterwards. I confirmed our booking by phone the following weekend.

While in Niagara, we’re going to do something that one of us has never done before. We’re doing the Journey Behind the Falls which I’ve done but not my girlfriend and the plan is for the Saturday morning before we head off on our wine tour, we’re going to go for a ride on The Maid of the Mist which she’s done but I haven’t.

Weather permitting, on our way home we’re going to stop in St Catharines at Lock 3 of the Welland Canal. With any luck we’ll see a ship going through.

All in all, it promises to be a wonderful weekend. I think I made us a fine jug of lemonade.

And before anyone gets any ideas about our houses being empty during our absence… forget it. Our husbands are staying home and we each have a large dog.

My fellow writing partner showed me a piece of software she had downloaded on her laptop before we went our separate ways after our “writing date”. It’s called ReadPlease 2003. Best of all, you can download it for FREE! Yes, I said free. And better still, it sounds natural. It’s not that tinny, monotone voice that some reading software programs have.

I downloaded it as soon as I got home and tried it out for myself. I copied and pasted the first chapter of my WIP manuscript into it and hit the play button. The software read what I’d written back to me.

In the free version of the software, there are four voices to choose from – two male and two female so you can choose the person you want to read your work back to you.

Reading your work aloud is the best way to judge the flow, pick up on wrong or missing words, or over-usage of a word within a short span of text. Now you can keep yourself from going hoarse and still get the job done.

ReadPlease can be found here: http://www.readplease.com/

After a great deal of aggravation, frustration and consternation, I finally got a proper “subscribe by e-mail” link set up on my blog. When I finally succeeded, the simplicity of it all was mind-boggling.

Here I’d been making it far more complicated than it needed to be. Anyway, to make a long story short, if you subscribe by e-mail to my blog, every time I put a new post up there, you’ll be notified.

Some months, I’m quite prolific on the blogging front… other months not so much.