Here's my latest published newspaper article

[jmowreader]

https://www.cdapress.com/local_news/20191129/this_is_the_parade_youre_looking_for

My city, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, has an all-female parade performance group called the Blazen Divaz. This year's Big Trip for them was to the 6ABC Dunkin' Thanksgiving Day Parade in Philadelphia. I went with them to report on it, and the story is above.

[JohnnyLib2]

1. Read and enjoyed!

Made me want to go to that parade sometime. Good for the divas!

[jmowreader]

2. The weird thing is...

That is not the story I had planned to write. I had built this really nice article themed around the song "Seventy-Six Trombones" from The Music Man. That article was lots of fun. It made the whole show sound like this rollicking circus...which, of course, is kind of the point of a big parade. Add a few quotes and a dozen photos, and I'm done. I knew I was going to need some extra time because when I shoot digital I shoot a LOT - I left the parade ground with about 800 photos to go through. I only shoot digital for the newspaper, but I think next year I'm going to try a vacation with only my Nikon D500.

And then Philly got whacked by gale-force winds on Thanksgiving morning. They grounded all the balloons, lots of units (like the Philly Professional Sports Mascots and the Eagles players) dropped out of the line of march, a Star Wars fan club completely stole the show, and my really cute article became completely useless. So, I went back to the hotel, deleted everything after "The Divas were Blazen. The weather? Not so much." and wrote an entirely new story in about 45 minutes.

One thing that did help my writing is there were only really three units in the parade worthy of writing about: the Blazen Divaz, who I flew across the country to photograph; the Star Wars cosplayers; and a club that dresses up in 1890s-style suits to ride boneshakers, penny-farthings and velocipedes.