The day before yesterday, I put out a challenge to you, dear readers, asking for five words - any five words - that I would then incorporate into an upcoming blog post. And, my friend Michael Bell, rose to the challenge.
     Here are the words: 
extemporaneous, ministerial, claudication,
recalcitrant and embarkation.
     Here is the story.
     She was a contumacious and recalcitrant child - always in trouble, stubborn as a mule and flagrantly disrespectful to authority of any kind. This was a huge problem for me, because at the time I was pastoring a small church in northern Maine while completing my ministerial education at the University of Maine at Portland-Gorham. 
     It was hard to maintain any spiritual authority over the congregation when my daughter was the obstreperously bad girl of the town. This problem had been simmering for a while, and seemed headed toward a full boil at any moment. 
     It ultimately came to a head one Sunday evening in March as I was delivering an extemporaneous talk on the problems of parenting. I had very little need for any additional research on the matter, I was living my message day after day. 
     It was a good Pentecostal service, lots of singing, plenty of testimonies, and lots more singing. Unfortunately, our worship leader was out sick that night and I made the mistake of deciding that I would just fill in for him and not have to bother anyone else for talking his place.     
     But I hadn't planned on dear old sister Gladys leading not one, but three of her victory marches - and not only around the inside perimeter of the church, by out the front doors and around the church - twice!
     When I finally got the congregation back in and settled down a bit, my claudification had worked itself into an all-out painfest. I was limping badly from that old football injury and the knee surgery that followed. Sometimes just standing still for a while would make it calm down, but there was no chance for that tonight, as now I had to deliver my sermon. The show must go on.
     I began with a story about my father, who before moving to the East Coast, had worked for a time at the San Francisco Port of Embarkation loading Army supplies off the trains and onto ships for delivery to our troops in the Pacific. 
     Not more than a few minutes into the story, my daughter - who had probably heard the story more times than I could count, dropped her hymnal - or perhaps two or three of them - onto the hardwood floor and stood up. 
     I stopped. There was complete silence. Every eye turned to her, and then to me. This was a test. We stood unmoving for what seemed an eternity. Then she turned and walked out of the church, letting the doors into the vestibule slam behind her. 
     What could I do? I continued my talk. Perhaps it was shorter than I intended, and maybe a bit incoherent toward the end. But I gave the benediction, performed my pastoral duties at the door, and went home alone. 
         
    

     Don't you just love it when you start out to do something, and then there's something else you want to do, but you have to choose one or the other ... and then, BAM, you find out that just by doing one of them, the other one just magically gets done too?
     That happens quite a bit in my life actually. And this time it was about blogging and tweeting. 
     I've had a blog - OK, several blogs over the years, and a Twitter account for at least a year, maybe two. And then a few months ago I did a total makeover on my website, from scratch, using a online website builder called Weebly. 
     And it had a built-in blogging widget, which I started using, and it automatically tweets my blog post titles! Kk! So, I am now also tweeting every few days, with no extra effort. You gotta love it! It also can automagically post to Facebook, but I'm still on the fence about Facebook, because I basically don't trust them when you have to give an app permission to use your account info. I understand that sometimes the apps can actually make posts to your friends that seem to come from you but aren't. I really need to sit down with someone and resolve whether or how I'm going to utilize Facebook once and for all. And get off the fence.

     Well, I'm several days late on this - National Grammar Day was March 4th. But it's been that long since I was on Facebook. Anyway, someone had posted this, and - being a writer - I just couldn't help but pass this one on.
     I LOVE words, and all that comes with them: meanings, variations, phrases, clauses, gerunds, verbals, all sorts of punctuation - like en and em dashes, diacritical marks, elipses and et cetera ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
     Here's a little word game. Send me any five words, and I will use them all in an upcoming post. Come on, challenge me!

     In a sense this is an experiment, but not one lightly embarked upon. 
     You see, I have been very fortunate over the last 35 or so years to get paid for writing and publishing technical documentation. 
     But, up until a few years ago, I had never gotten paid for my poetry or fiction. Then my friends and I published a collection of short stories and poems, and actually sold some of them. It's not like we've actually made a profit at this point. But just having people, often strangers, buy your book, i.e. pay to read something you wrote, is an awesome event.
     The writing, editing and publishing part of the process was made easier - but not easy exactly - by my years as a technical writer. Yet somehow that did not simply translate into being able to submit my poetry and fiction for publication to people and publications that might actually pay me straight out for the privilege of publishing my work.
     Ah, but, just because I haven't quite got to that point, doesn't mean that you can't. 
     I've been thinking for a while how publications have gotten started in the past. Small groups of people that got together and found ways to publish and charge for content. Many of them started paying their writers immediately, either from founders' contributions, subscriptions or advertising revenue.
     It seems like many of the places today make promises that you can make a lot of money - someday, especially if you pay them something up front, or if they collect the money with the promise of paying you sometime in the distant future when your balance reaches a certain threshold.  Nice carrot!
     Anyway, to make a long story a little shorter ... I am offering to pay for guest posts to this blog. It is going to be a six-month experiment. And I am going to pay on acceptance, $0.01 per word. Yes, that's one cent per word. And, that doesn't sound like a lot of money, I know. But while I was writing this, I did some Googling on "upfront pay for writing" sites, and even well-establish sites don't pay a lot more for "new" writers. 
     I've often heard that many famous writers got started in magazines that paid per word, but couldn't find a lot of hard evidence in a quick Google search.
     Anyway, I'm going to give it a try. Because you deserve to get paid for your writing don't you?
     Payment will be on acceptance. Guidelines will be forthcoming. Looking for 300-500 word articles on almost any subject except crudity or controversy for it's own sake and anything that intends to attack or alienate people. What  you got?

     I must have read Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Becket, in high school or college, but it's been a very long time. Someone mentioned it the other day and I thought I'd revisit it. Just finished reading Act 1 tonight and started on Act 2.
     While looking for a picture for this post, I ran across this one, and an article about the new production coming to Broadway this fall starting Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. This ought to be an awesome experience!
     They will both star in “No Man’s Land” and “Waiting for Godot,” and both productions will be directed by Sean Mathias and will be performed in repertory.
     “In ‘Waiting for Godot,’ two men exist in a universe that is both real and imagined – a place where time does not always advance towards a future,” said Mathias. “And as the two men wait, two outsiders enter to disrupt that universe. In ‘No Man’s Land,’ two men inhabit a land that is neither here nor there – a land where time and memory play unreliable tricks. And as these two men converse, two other men who are both familiar and unfamiliar enter this same land with unnerving effect.
     You can read the entire play for free, here.

     This post introduces what I hope will be a weekly feature of my blog--if my deteriorating memory allows me to remember an intention that long!
     As a writer, and a publisher--and as a Writing and Publishing Coach--I often find myself searching for, and finding solutions to problems that don't come up that often, but that I can't help but feel must be "out there," and that I think my readers may find helpful, either now or in the future. 
     The other day I received a Word document with about twenty images, screen captures in it. Now, I could have asked the person to resend me the screen captures in a zip file, but I know that most people don't like to resend things, especially if it takes a significant amount of time to prepare them--again. Especially when sending them the first time involves a non-trivial amount of work to begin with.
     So, I knew I could just right-click each picture and save it. But that seemed a bit tedious and un-technological. So I turned to Google, and in a few minutes had found this neat little trick.
     With Word 2007, Microsoft introduced the XML-based .docx file format. The new format is essentially a ZIP container, which contains a series of XML files and any embedded images. When trying out any new operation on a file, make sure you have copied the file to somewhere else for safekeeping first.
     To access the embedded images in a .docx file, use the following steps:

1. If the file is not already a .docx file, open the file in Word 2007 (or higher) and save it as a Word Document (*.docx).
2. In Windows Explorer, change the file extension on the original file from .docx to .zip.
3. Now double-click on the file. It should display the files and folders inside the zip file, including a "word" folder, and inside that a "media" folder. Within the media folder--voila--all of the images in the document! 

Unfortunately, the images do not have their original names, i.e. they are named image1, image2, etc. But I think this is due to the fact that many images may have been pasted in from the clipboard and wouldn't have names anyway.


So perhaps one day, a friend or associate will send you a Word document with several images, and you want a quick way to get them out of the file. "Oh yeah," you'll think, "Len blogged about that. I'll just go to the main page of lenhodgeman.com, type "extract" in the Search box at the top of the screen, and BINGO--there it is! Way cool. 


If you should get a chance to use this tip, please let me know by commenting on this post, or dropping me an email through the Contact form on the website.

      I sit on a slatted wooden bench in front of the duck pond just a couple of hundred feet from my condo. There are a few dozen ducks of various sizes--families I suppose--swimming in the pond and clammering on the bank opposite me. And a few rather large geese.
    There is an elderly couple on a bench across from me throwing handfuls of feed onto the path, and grabbing everyone's attention.
    The afternoon March 1st sunshine is mottled by the copious greenery overhead, yet still pleasantly warm on my face though the air is cool enough that my wool coat is not uncomfortable.
    A white gull swoops in from the west to get in on the action, the ducks grumble and edge aside reluctantly. And then another, possibly its mate, and everybody reshuffles their positions.
    A couple of black crows prance nervously nearby, as though they know they're not welcome, or the scne is just to competitive for them.
    The water feature directly in front of me, yet not too near to enjoy its full grandeur, throws hundreds of gallons of water forty feet into the air out of twenty or so jets, that coming crashing down in a primal rhythm that feels like Gaea's lullaby.
    This is WoodLake, and the first time I have stopped to sit in the afternoon sun all winter, my first winter here, in this lovely park-like surrounding, my home.
    As I walk back to my condo, the sound of mourning doves brings back that plaintive feeling of aloneness that is not lonely, of being one in a great big world, and sings to me that this is a good thing, right and true. And that for now, this is my choice.