Where Does the Time Go?

Where Does the Time Go?!

How can it be…it feels like I just wrote a blog yesterday and yet, here I am in late February!  Somebody whip me with a wet noodle!  Okay, maybe just the cuffs…Maybe just sneak up on me and…

Never mind!  As usual, I digress!

I am working, again, as always, on this new book idea…still!!!  And I have now written the opening scene maybe a million times!  Okay, at least 65!  I’ve read some of the openings aloud, at signings or workshops, and everyone seems to love them, but they “don’t have legs.”  They just won’t go any further!

Fifty versions began with “I used to be normal.”  Finally, this last version began with the truth…  “Who am I kidding?  I have never been normal!”

Maybe now I’m getting somewhere.

I have this theory about my writing.  Sometimes I just have to plod along and write until I get to know my characters, until they take on lives and voices of their own and go for it.  The subplot characters were doing fine…Lucy and Modean knew who they were and what they wanted.  It was just old Molly, Mollie, Kate, Isabel who couldn’t even pick a name and stick to it!  Even the dog finally picked his name, Mr. Greenjeans.  Once the dog speaks, you’ve got to keep writing!

So I’m trying.

In the meantime, Christmas came and went, my Dad got very, very ill and is getting worse, my mom broke her pelvis, and Ben’s not doing too well with Algebra.  Such is life in the Sandwich Generation.

I did, however, get to go to Holden Beach this past weekend to write and it was awesome…When we left it was raining…little spritzes of snow intermingling with the raindrops, the gray fog just lifting over the matching gray ocean, a lone seagull, dark against the gloomy horizon.  What a perfect weekend for writing!

I went to my writing partner’s house.  Wendy is a quiet, delightful woman who exudes peace and well-being.  We got up every morning, had simple breakfasts and then wrote (well, she painted this time.)  Broke for lunch, wrote after lunch, made very low-key suppers and then read or revised until early bedtimes.  Boring? Maybe but heaven sent for me.  I can’t remember the last weekend without the backdrop of a TV or telephone ringing.

And then it was back to reality and the crunch of re-entry.  Dirty laundry, “What’s for supper?” Missed orthodontist appointment. Sick kid.  Ah, life in the fast lane!