Sunday, May 13, 2007A picture is worth...WOW.That was amazing. I had SO many reactions to that previous post... and just about none of them matched the words themselves. Ranging from tears to congratulations, just about everyone who called or wrote was positive that I was selling my house. Just to be absolutely clear: I am not. The sign literally showed up, by accident, in my front lawn. It was a mistake by Zip Realty. My address was similar to another house that was listed. Whups. "Zip" was apparently the amount of effort they had spent to fact check their listings. What is amazing is the power of the image. I am not an image person myself. I am pure words. I will walk into the wrong bathroom if there isn't a word posted underneath the icon of a man or woman. I loathe Mac computers because they are so "intuitive" they don't have to use words. Unfortunately, this renders them incomprehensible to the verbal types in the world, like me. An image of a For Sale sign in front of a house is so iconographic that it trumps any amount of words written beneath it. I mean, verbal or not, even I had a moment wondering if I was selling. (Which, I repeat, I am not.) So even though I was obviously messing with language and implying one thing while saying another, no one who responded to me was willing to believe that the image was false. They would prefer to doubt the language, or at least live in its ambiguity. An image of a For Sale sign is blissfully non-ambiguous. It's obvious what is going on, so the words are discounted. Even though, actually, the truth is far different from the connoted meaning. A picture is not worth 1000 words. A picture is worth all of them. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 11:05 PM 3 comments  
Tuesday, May 08, 2007Life Moves Pretty Fast... No one can accuse me of doing things halfway. For some time now, I've regaled my friends and family with my whining about how I'd love to live in Northern California, how I'd love to change jobs, how I'm living 100 yards from the place I most wanted to see the end of when I graduated high school a million billion years ago. Friends also know that I have the tenacity of a pitbull. If I say I'm going to stick with something, damn it. I stick to it. So when I said I'd stay in one spot long enough to see the kids graduate from high school... boy, I truly meant it. However. Sometimes it really is time to make a change. It started with cleaning the garage. Suddenly I was overwhelmed with all the baggage I'd been carrying around. Since I've more or less completed the project, I've felt so much freer. Able to look around and make some decisions. Able to see what really needs to be done. I had to clear out the baggage all the way down. It was a tough decision. Very tough. But once I got the whisper in my ear that I could no longer continue down the path I'd been slogging down for what seemed forever, I just couldn't ignore it. Sometimes you just have to change paths. So I did it. I pulled the plug on the old and am ringing in the new. This email is the official announcement. And I'm sorry if it comes as a shock to some of you. Some decisions are best left un-discussed. I started on the new project about a week ago. Today I make it public: I'm no longer working on the novel I started in November, but have started reworking an old favorite of mine called Hurts Me Too. You will love it. Oddly enough, it's about a girl who drives to work one day, stops for a croissant, and then decides to sell her house, take her kids out of school and take off for the unplanned untamed unknown. Which I would never do, of course. Being the responsible woman I am. But boy, I sure am up for about 500 pages of fantasizing about it. Oh, and this sign? It showed up on my front lawn today. Freaky, those powers of manifestation. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 8:43 PM 1 comments
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