Life & Writing Report
I watched Olympics yesterday. That’s about it. I got a freebie six-month subscription to Peacock thanks to switching internet providers, so I sampled the awesomeness of “multi view,” for the men’s team gymnastic finals. It’s a 4-way split screen showing all the active equipment with ZERO commentary, so it’s the best of EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE. Freaking delightful. Today it’s the women’s team finals the same way. Fanfreakingtastic.
Bonus: since multi view means seeing far more competitors, it’s dramatically easier to see the variation between the top five or six medalist-level performers and the other twenty or so of the world’s best.
Anyway. I did all the regular day things as well as watching TV, starting with “get up before 7AM to move the car in case workers show up or paving happened (Nope. Rain happened instead. Just enough that I don’t have to water plants this week.)
I had the Usual Breakfast of toast & tea & Lunch Snack of nut mix, fruit, and cheese. Supper was Homemade Chili Day Three, with salty-peppery-buttery corn on the cob and the summer’s best watermelon so far for sides.
Did I mention that I made a bias pot of chili, a batch of cornbread & chocolate chip cookies Saturday? No? Well, I did. Basically I wanted to get the hot-kitchen stuff done before this week’s humid melty-hotness arrived. And…it worked. Also I fed & watered birds, cut back weeds, and took pictures of flowers, as one does when one has a garden in summer.
But mostly I watched buff dudes do incredible athletic routines and puttered around with my the book promos I make for my website and social media.
Did I spend literal hours tinkering with the wording of maybe twenty sentences? I did. Do I regret it? I do not. It counts as writing, or so says me, and more importantly, I (re) made things and it brought me joy.
The physical act of playing with written words, substituting one for another, applying different verb choices, trying out different cadences, pacing and rhythms by changing word order, sentence order or even paragraph breaks—that’s my happy place. Tinkering with the actual words themselves is the fun part of my writing process for me. I can lose myself in it for hours, like a toddler with a bunch of wooden blocks.
Giving myself permission to just play like that that isn’t as easy as I’d like it to be. It goes against the wisdom dispensed by every single professional writing guide and writing teacher I’ve encountered. Sure, some of them cushion the foundation principle of “don’t edit and/or censor yourself, don’t go over old work again again” with caveats about everyone’s process being different, but hedging about the elephant in the room doesn’t really hide the elephant very well. So to speak.
ANYway. I spent hours happily puttering and thinking about story elements, and that was good enough for the day. It’s good enough for me to say with some confidence that I still love doing this.
Not the activity itself, honestly. Forcing my thoughts into solid form as words is a a complete shitshow pain in the ass, always has been, likely always will be.
But I do love seeing this result of that hard work glowing here on my screen, and I am disproportionately proud of myself for getting words down more days than not, lately.
Because sometimes I wonder, you know? The number of words I have energy to put into pixels goes up & down in cycles, like everything else in my life. The urge to write fluctuates like a tide coming in and out—or maybe more like a river that only flows in certain seasons.
Yeah. And when the streambed is dry, even when I know that it’s normal and natural for the river to just…go away…I still end up wondering if maybe this time it won’t ever come back again.
But here we are. I’m making things, baking things, and building things, there’s joy in all of it, and that’s all good.
That’s all for now.
This is the part where I plug my books.
What’s on your bookshelf?
Have you considered adding one of my books to your collection?
I recommend The Rollover Files for hopepunk tales of about an alternate world where moms with midlife crisis superpowers have been saving the world and making the military nervous since 1943..
I'f you’d prefer a completed, quirky, slow burn science fiction thriller duology with a romance chaser, choose The Stories Of The Restoration.
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