My Little Missionary or Life On Fire, Footnoted

OK, two weeks of this under my belt, and I have to say I love the way blogs "manage" your writing. Labelling, sorting and archiving posts sorta legitimizes the whole process, doesn't it? I don't have "thoughts" -- I have Thoughts. Ditto regarding the way I can link and footnote. When I was working on my first novel (that's the unpublished one in a box in my attic if you were wondering, thanks for asking!) I sometimes found myself making weird tree diagrams with stacks of real cut-and-pasted manuscript pages, trying to figure out what went where (you only have to resort to this if you're ambitious enough, or stupid enough, to try to create a novel from six points of view). If only I'd written it in blog form! I could have easily linked portions of the narrative, like this:

In her Friend V (she of the fire-n-brimstone grandma), Elder Girleen found her first theologically-inclined buddy. Last year in preschool, Elder Girleen and V discovered that they both knew the words to "Jesus Loves You" (taught to Elder Girleen by her grandmother, not on my watch), which they then with great relish taught the whole preschool class. Causing so much consternation that the teacher felt obligated to put the following into her weekly newsletter for parents:

"Some of you have asked why I am teaching your children the words to religious songs. Some of the children have enjoyed teaching songs they know to other children in the class. Learning religious songs is not part of the instruction at XXXX Preschool."

Just so we've all got our separation of church and state straight.