As I mentioned in the last post, most of us spent yesterday taking a break to explore the island. Well, today saw us return to form as we dove back into our writing. The lecture part of the day focused on how to handle verb tense changes (e.g., narrative present versus the present tense of the verbs) as well as “framing” as a story construction technique. We reverted back to our normal routines of eating, writing, printing, and reading for the rest of the day.

I should probably take a moment to describe the island wildlife, “wild” being a relative term. There were two rams roaming the island–their names were Freckles and Feisty. They loved having their ears scratched, but took patting on the head as some sort of head-butting challenge. Maybe that was because they were recently shorn, and so were a little more cranky than usual. Here they are hanging out behind West Camp (one of them is in the shadow of the building):

rams freckles feisty

As for other wildlife, I thought I saw a squirrel, and one night I thought I heard a deer stomping about in the woods near by cabin (though this might have been one of the rams come to visit me in the midnight hours). I also heard a dog barking, but it turns out that was the dog of the owner of a neighboring island–sound carries between islands, evidently.

Oh, and one day walking to breakfast I saw this fearsome creature walking across the path:

orange slug

And here’s a spiderweb affixed to my cabin doorway:

spiderweb

Okay, so, aside from mosquitoes, we weren’t in mortal danger from the wildlife.

Moving right along.

Here’s a pic of the view from East Camp towards Jonesport–though the sky was forbidding, we actually didn’t get any rain:

storm clouds over Norton Island

Finally, note that, being on an island, water was a recurring theme during our stay there. The island itself, by definition, is surrounded by water. Since the island was off-the-grid, we had to conserve water when the water supply dropped to critical levels. And we got our share of drenching rain and pervasive mist. So, needless to say, the siren song of the water was very strong there on the island. Well, today was the day, perhaps overcome by this water theme, that Lynda (accidentally?) threw our manuscripts she was reading into the water. I like to rather think of it that our stories were a worthy offering to the gods than a casting away of our poor point of view choices and too frequent uses of unattributed dialogue.

Lynda soggy manuscripts

But wait–there’s another water-themed event (a cautionary tale, actually) coming in the final post, so stay tuned!

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Norton Island Writers Workshop post series: