I’m all off this week because of the holiday. Mondays off always throw me for a loop – not that I’m complaining. But the Thursday blog entry is now a Friday blog entry since everything is a day removed.
Speaking of which… I’ve had some time to review this year in blogging and have decided to make a change and post book reviews here MUCH less in the new year. Caseykins.com was always meant to be an author site, and I feel like it’s getting away from its purpose if all I do is post about books that often aren’t even in the genre I’m writing in. So… I started another blog for the reviews. I’ll likely still post the quarterly reading list here, and blog anything I totally fall head over heels for. But in general I’m trying to keep all things novel to Book Dragon. And that way if you like the book reviews, you can get that almost exclusively. And if you like these little writing process and slice of life things, you can get that almost exclusively too. This year was the first year I didn’t see a dramatic growth in people visiting the site, and I feel like the confused image might be some of the problem…
One of my tasks for the New Year was to incorporate more practice into my writing. I’ll most likely be trying to substitute the book posts with these little vignettes. I wrote this after visiting the Santa Monica Pier with Brian on the 1st. It was crazy-busy down there, but still a good trip:
Brian and I sat on a concrete bench on the busy, bright pier for quite a while, just watching the waves crash on the thick barnacled supports beneath us.
A family came soon after we sat and took the other end of the bench. They weren’t speaking English. I don’t know if it was French or what (I don’t think it was French really), but they were all older people, the men with close-cropped hair and the women wearing bright floral scarves tied under their throats. One of the men was pushing an empty stroller, and in the arms of the other man was a small girl with the curliest and reddest of hair. She was wearing a pink fuzzy coat with yellow butterflies clipped all over it. Their crepe wings fluttered in the ocean breeze. The family sat down next to us, and she threw herself backward in the arms of her father? Grandfather? And squealed every time the orange roller coaster swooped past with a rattle.
Eventually she started to fuss a bit, and the man started to sing to her. I didn’t recognize all of it, but one of the verses seemed to be a question about kilometers. And then he sang her Frere Jaques. That was her favorite, because she sang it back, her little voice not making all the syllables. She squirmed to get down, and continued singing while yanking herself backward on the steel pier railings, her little feet, in white tights, still on the wood deck.
It was sweet, and it made me smile.
The family took a selfie with the waves in the background, the shoreline stretching like a crescent behind them into oblivion. And then they bundled their things and strolled away again towards the food booths. The little girl was probably too young to remember her trip to California. Not through anything other than pictures of herself. But I’ll remember her now.
Photo credit to Brian. Thanks, dear!
Casey E. Hamilton 