December Daily: beautiful sights

29 -- mecurtin, What is the most beautiful sight you see outside on a regular basis? Can be a building, landscape, plant, animal, artwork, people playing, whatever.

The first thing you have to know is that our city in Illinois was flat, flat, flat. It was so flat that when I first drove up to meet the spouse there, if I stopped paying attention to the landscape, I would begin to feel as though I was driving on an impossibly long bridge over a lake or something -- water was the only thing in my experience that was that flat.

But now I live in the part of the Midwest that somehow escaped being scraped down by glaciers, and so there are hills.

So the most beautiful thing I see outside is some broad, unexpected, ridiculously scenic view. Like, I walk out the door of the Farm and Fleet and I can look out over rolling hills, dun-colored at this time of year and dotted with black and white cows and textured with bare cornfields, and as I gradually turn my head, the brick buildings of the tiny university come into view with the sunset on them. It's like living in a jigsaw puzzle.




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Anyone interested in a January writer's sketchbook?

I've been enjoying the December Daily, and trying to think of something to do for January. I started thinking about the possibility of the equivalent of a sketchbook for writers, and one of the ideas I had was that you could have one column of prompts and one column of styles, and randomly choose one of each.

I couldn't think of any prompts, but I came up with a whole mess o' styles:

P.G. Wodehouse
Jane Austen
a trite YA dystopia
the Official Policies and Procedures
a Lush catalog
a wine-tasting expert
an old-fashioned bodice-ripper
a Novel By a Man
a literary novel
a perfume expert
a high-end menu
a diner menu
an article in Martha Stewart Living
a sci-fi raygun shoot-em-up
a diet book
Charles Dickens
a Leonard Cohen song
the annual report of a failing tech startup
a spam email
your ex-boyfriend when he's tipsy and nostalgic
a department-store makeup specialist
an advice columnist

Would anyone else be interested in trying to do something like this? Does anyone have any ideas about how to make this better?