A random harvest...

Life is a mixed bag, isn't it? This week's post will be a mixed bag, too. A random harvest of my discoveries in the past week or so. Since the workshop - well, after I got home and unpacked from the workshop - I've been inspired to write. There was no time for that at the workshop, which is all about making it possible for others to write. So I came home and found myself pushing everything else aside so I could write.  And I fell in love with my story all over again. Seriously. In love.

I'm not this neat, but I do all my editing by hand

Author Herman Wouk

Author Steve Haskin

Yesterday, I read the most wonderful post by my favorite racing writer, Steve  Haskin. It did include horse racing, but it was mostly about his dad. He included a letter from his dad, who was in the service and wrote about his experience during the invasion of Luzon in the Pacific Theater during WWII. If you click on his name you can read it for yourself - as I wrote in my comment on the post, Steve's dad's letter reminded me of Herman Wouk and James Michener, writing of their own experiences in the South Pacific during the war. The awareness and clarity in how they wrote is powerful and moving. The funny part of this is that my comment to Steve kicked off a three-way thread with another commenter about Herman Wouk! Twenty-four hours later, the three of  us are still going back and forth.

And then there's the title to this post - "random harvest." If you don't get the reference, I'm not surprised. There was a book by that name, Random Harvest, written by James Hilton, author of Lost Horizon and Goodbye Mr. Chips among others. Random Harvest was made into a film with Ronald Colman and Greer Garson. Like so many films, it wasn't as good as the book. On the other hand, it was still pretty darn terrific as I realized recently when I saw it on TCM.

Random Harvest is a love story, an unusual love story. I've been trying to think of why this fits in with the other elements of this post, and that's it - an unusual love story. That's the common theme here - unusual love stories. A writer falls in love with her own story, a father's love for his son leads him to do something extraordinary, and I can't tell you about Random Harvest and what's unusual there - you have to read it and find out for yourself.

Enjoy your reading, enjoy your writing, and enjoy your own unusual love story...

Take care,
Doc