Kana's Chronicles

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Let it not be said that reclusive writers have no social life. The world is at my fingertips these days, even when I’m curled up in bed. I will confess that my physical geography has been exceedingly limited since my seasonal summer-job ended last month. We live out in the country with a single car (and zip for extra gas-money) and the bit of income I do make happens entirely at my keyboard.

Plus, I tend to go into hibernation-mode when the weather gets cold (it hasn’t snowed on us yet, but we still had frost at 10 this morning), and I’m perfectly happy to wake in the morning and consult my calendar to find there’s nowhere I have to go today. Which is, in fact, the case on most days. I’m not sure why I keep a calendar–except, perhaps, for the daily opportunity to cheer at its vacancy.

Somehow, though, it still comes as a startling realization to me that I’ve rarely left the house these last two months. I don’t FEEL as if I’ve been “shut-in,” and that’s probably due to the fact that I’ve been engaging with other people the whole time. I HATE the telephone, but I’m “plugged in” around the clock with Facebook, Twitter, and this kick-ass community of writers online. Oh, yeah–and the new “boss” on IM, sending me the day’s freelance assignment every a.m. Kinda like opening a fortune cookie every morning to find out what off-the-wall topic I need to learn write about today. The flavor of the day is… “Dog costumes“!?

Suzy-cat is giving me one of those “don’t-you-dare” glares, though I’m sure she’d look lovely as a pumpkin…

I used to turn into a pumpkin myself by midnight–or at least become as useless as one–but that’s another change with the freedom of my unstructured days. I give myself permission to disregard the clock, because it’s not going to scream at me in the morning. Which is how it came about, in the wee hours of this morning, that I was fiddling around with a free graphing-app on my iPad, and discovering yet again the joys of personal networking.

I really had a simple little idea in mind–a pie-chart I could update through November to boost my morale during NaNoWriMo that Extreme Writing Event about which I’ve pledged not to blog, by charting my word-count-progress. Couldn’t figure out the stupid simple app, though, so I went to the developer website for help… and discovered it’s written in Polish. Amused at my own expense (as I so often am), I Tweeted the joke on myself, proposing that I needed a translator-app to decipher my graphing-app… and went back to playing with my pie.

A few minutes later a fellow writer in my network pinged me: “I speak Polish–need help?”

Now how cool is THAT?

I had, in the meantime, succeeded in my struggles with the pie-chart (“easy as pie,” ha!) but I WAS curious about the meaning of the cut-and-paste question I’d included in my Tweet–a pair of words with more consonants than vowels (because when God divided up languages at Babel, Hawai’ians evidently got all the vowels & Poles got the consonants), the meaning of which I had no earthly idea. I hoped I hadn’t just spammed my fifty-five followers with some Slavic profanity…

I could almost hear her laugh (though I’ve never met her) when the reply rang in: “Yeah, it means ‘Did you find a solution?‘”

I DID, thank you. Though in the most unexpected of quarters. And THAT, in a pumpkin-shell, is life’s little lesson in the wee hours: you never know along which vine the answer might arrive, but there are Answers out there if you stay connected. The Great Pumpkin has a sense of humor. As any gourd God would have to, putting up with the likes of me.