Comfort Food

February 16, 2015annabowling 6 Comments

Some days start out with a four page to-do list and end up with comfort food.

This is one of those days. Two dear friends have beloved mothers in the hospital, at the same time, in different states, and I can’t be with either of them, though I’d love to be with both. One expects to get her mom settled back into her own home by the end of the week, and the other, oh, my heart aches. I don’t even want to type it.

Real Life Romance Hero was home today, both of us drained and cranky and concerned for our friends. We made grilled cheese and tomato soup and hung out in the kitchen, discussing food and film and baking lemon poppyseed quickbread. He advocated greasing the pan when the directions didn’t call for it, and dumping the excess butter in the batter, both of which ended up happening. Dinner will be Chinese delivery or meatloaf and his homemade mashed potatoes (that would be Real Life Romance Hero’s mashed potatoes. I don’t know if Meat Loaf makes mashed potatoes or not, but if he does, that would be fitting.)

Prior to the comfort food, I shoveled the walk, for the third time in twenty four hours, and, also for the second time in twenty four hours, hauled a load to the laundromat. Not my first choice of activities after said shoveling, but A) it’s February, B) we live in Upstate New York, and C) I was out of socks and long sleeved shirts. So, laundry had to happen.

Today’s workplace

The smaller pad, next to the Diet Coke can, ended up with a four-page to-do list, which I informed Real Life Romance Hero about upon my return. I told him also that Plan B was to say “forget all that and watch movies.” Because sometimes, we have to. Our bodies are tired. Our heads are full. Our hearts are heavy. This is one of those days, and I do have Revolutionary Road, which I know darned well is going to be gorgeous and tragic all at once, waiting for me. I haven’t cracked it open yet, because that’s the way the day has gone.

That four page to-do list? There are going to be a lot of arrows on it. Arrows, in my lists, mean carry over to the next day. Because there will be one. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my time on this planet, it is that. Carrying things over from one to-do list to another doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is the way I accepted that today. Okay, not going to get All The Things checked off today, but did have a good hangout in the kitchen with Real Life Romance Hero, got to warn him not to touch the food until I’d photographed it, and had a much-needed break where we got to discuss Things That Are Important (friends’ mums, what both of us are doing with work these days, how the deep freeze outside affects our plans for the week) and Things That Are Not (current movies neither of us want to see, things we each read on the interwebs, how to share a single order of silver dollar pancakes and what side dishes there should be with that.)

We’re in a lull now, him doing dishes in the kitchen, and me under an afghan in the comfy chair, Spotify open and tuned to one of my story playlists, inspiration picture open in another window. We’re both waiting for the quick bread to cool (he calls it “a dirty tease” that there is an in-pan cooling period and an out-of-pan cooling period.) He’s puttering and I’m…writing.

It strikes me funny that, when not so long ago, trying to write meant me smashing my head against a brick wall for hours at a time, and now, when I’ve given myself permission to take a day off, I’m diving into my fictive world because that really is where I want to be, when I can be anywhere. To have the WIP be the place to go for comfort and rest, that’s a pretty good thing. I will take that, and gladly.

View from the laundromat

Duluth, Part Three

February 11, 2015annabowling 2 Comments

You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

–Eleanor Roosevelt

Here, on this lovely not-currently-snowing day, we bring the Duluth trilogy to a close. In case you missed them, part one is here, and part two, here. These all came about in the throes of writerly angst, when getting anything, even an incoherent brain dump, on the page felt like an insurmountable task. Obviously, that wasn’t permanent, but boy, did it feel like it at the time.

Duluth, pt 3

Since a writer’s work is, literally, all in their head, (and yes, I know I’ve drifted from the original topic of this post, but I don’t care; I’ll bring it back around) the upside is that there will be far fewer needles and surgical procedures involved in the writer’s recuperation, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less exhausting, aggravating and even painful. It’s neccessary, though, because writing isn’t something one can turn off. If you are, you are, and if you aren’t, you aren’t. While it is possible to be a writer who doesn’t write, as in someone who is genetically predisposed/hardwired/whatever term you’d care to use, who does not choose to exercise that ability, they aren’t the easiest people to live with and trust me, they’re not having a good time. It’s like trying not to breathe.

There’s the want. There’s the need. The how, however, that’s a different story, pun intended. Trust me, it’s easier to maintain a full creative well than to refill it. Ever try to fill an empty swimming pool using your kitchen tap? Whether it’s hooking up the garden hose so that one end is in the sink and the other in the deep end, or carrying buckets with or without the help of family members. it’s going to take a while. A long while. By that time, it’ll be too cold to swim, so what’s the point? Nope, better to call one of those trucks from the pool company and have them all dump it in at once. That, for the writer, is reading. A lot. In genre, out of genre. Books. Magazines. Backs of cereal boxes. Posters on the coffee house wall. Junk mail. Actual paper letters (really, send a writer one of these and they will love you even more.) Ebooks. Forum posts. Graphic novels. Library books. Closed captioning on movies and tv shows. Read read read read read read read until it’s not possible to hold any more.

Like with the pool illustration, if the creative well is empty, it may take a LOT of reading, a lot of taking in story in all its forms (movies, tv, plays, dance, computer games with a storyline or character development, etc.) It gushes in and in and in and in and in and in….that’s our transfusion. Next comes the physical therapy. Writing. Actual writing. I’m not going to say words on the page, because that phrase, I am pretty sure, was the piano that dropped on me, personally. Or maybe the pigeon that pooped in my eye when I looked up to see if the piano bench was going to fall, too.

At any rate, this stage of recovery means that there has to be actual writing. Meaning stuff in the writer’s head has to go someplace where it is possible, at least in theory, for somebody else to see it. Whether or not they actually do is not that important at this stage. For those who have a hypercritical gremlin in their head, jumping up and down and screaming “yes, it is!” it is okay to smack that gremlin with a copy of Outlander. If our writer had been in a physical car accident, do we expect them to crawl out of the wreckage and run a marathon? I’m thinking not.

What happens at this stage is spewing out everything that’s in the writer’s head, because even while the well is filling with good stuff, the bad stuff still has to come out. I’d say expressing pus, but that’s gross, but I also am taking advantage of this time to smack my hypercritical gremlins, so yes, it is at times like expressing pus. Bad stuff out so there’s room for the good stuff to come in.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that, things will begin to balance. The writer will get back in touch with why they accepted the invitation of all these people who live inside the writer’s head. The type of story, the type of character. They will get their voice back. They will fill notebooks and flash drives and whatever other method of storing data modern technology comes up with in the time between writing this and someone else reading it. Some of it is going to be venting. Okay, a lot of it is going to be venting. it’s going to be rough and confusing and attract hypercritical gremlins like blood in the water attracts sharks. Keep going. Because at some point, the balance will be reached. (Yes, that is passive phrasing, and no, I do not care, because hypercritical gremlins get my boot in their butt at this stage of the game.)

Up and down the steps. Up and down and up and down and up and down and then one day, without thinking about it, without planning to, without advance approval of the physical therapist, the writer takes the stairs instead of the ramp back to their room (or more likely, the vending machine on the third floor because that’s the one that has pub fries and gummi bears) – well looky there, stairs. Bunches of them. Climbed up and climbed down and the world did not end. Time to go back home and get back to business. And find directions to Duluth.

Duluth, Part Two

February 10, 2015annabowling 3 Comments

Mostly, you probably need to go deeper. Deeper, deeper, deeper. You should know everything there is to know about your characters and your settings.
–Barbara Samuel

I had a post all planned out for yesterday, but a deluge of the white stuff wiped that all out, so instead, hopping in the wayback machine to continue my Duluth post:

Sometimes, a girl (or guy) has to read. For girls (and guys) who write, that goes double. Not that it’s less important for those who read for pleasure only, because it’s certainly up there on the list of crucial things for maintaining life, along with breathing, food, water, rest, shelter, all that stuff. It should be noted that a decent bookstore or coffee shop should have all of the above, which is why I recommend visiting both as often as possible, but I digress.

The importance of reading for the writer goes double because it serves a double purpose. For most readers, reading is a break from everyday life. I say break, not escape, because when I close the covers of a book or power down my reader, the bills are still due, health isssues are still there, somebody still doesn’t get along with somebody, etc. I have to go back to what others may call “real life” but it’s with the knowledge that I carry some of the story I have read with me, and I can go back to it, or the next one, in the near future. It carries me through. True enough for all readers, but for those who write, we need to gorge, because we’re going to spew it all back out.

Seen those bumper stickers that say “no farms, no food?” We saw a good deal of them in the town where we used to live, as we were close to farm country, and it’s true. In the same way, “no books, no writers” could apply. Before any of you say it’s not the same, or ask if it shouldn’t be the other way around – “no writers, no books” – let’s put that aside for the time being.

Remember, whether you are reader or writer, that first book that invited you in. I say invited rather than sucked, because, unless there was a gun to your head or a rabid gorilla smacking his fist standing behind you, you had the option of putting the book down…but you didn’t want to. Staying with that book was an act of will. The rest of the world was going to have to wait, because what was in that story was more important.

Writers have to be, consistently, at that place where we can generate stories we hope will have that effect on people. While there are times when writers do the “just one more chapter and then I’ll stop” thing when at the keyboards (and we all want to be at that phase most of the time, I’m pretty sure) there are other times when we need to take in before we can put out.

Life, for anyone, can be exhausting. Things are going to happen. Natural disasters, injuries, illnesses, a sudden diagnosis when a loved one goes to see a doctor for something and then it turns out to be something else, which affects the entire family in ways nobody ever expected. New friends come. Old ones go. Sometimes, they come back, but it’s different than it was before. Work is crazy. Work is gone. Annoying situations grow to a point where they become unbearable and then every fiber of one’s being, every hour of every day, is focused with pinpoint accuracy on that one detail because nothing else can happen until that particular monster is penned and dispatched to the great beyond.

Now, do all of the above, in one year, and then put out a book, damnit. Preferably more than one. Oh, and be happy about it. Yeah, right. If it worked that way, cupcake, I would hop on my sparkly pink, winged unicorn and gallop through the clouds to Mount Olympus where I could have tea with Scarlett O’Hara, Darth Vader and the entire cast of Lost. (by which I mean the characters, not the actors) It doesn’t. Think of a series of life disruptions all happening basically at once like a car versus pedestrian car crash.

There the writer is, minding his/her own darm business, walking along and having mental conversations with imaginary people, when WHAM! Hit from behind. Get up. What happened? WHAM! Hit from the front. Well, okay, maybe I can get out of…WHAM! Sideswiped. Wham! Wham! Whamwhamwhamwhamwham! Before you know it, it’s a ten car pileup, and then, for no apparent reason, a piano drops on top of the writer like it’s a Looney Tunes cartoon.

We’re going to have some bruises here. Some blood loss. Some broken bones. Unless medical science has made dramatic advances in the last five minutes, we do have the technology and we can rebuild him/her, but not in an instant. Nope, it’s going to need a transfusion and bandages and some surgery most likely, and after that, after alllllll of that, we start the physical therapy. Not anyone’s idea of fun (except for masochists, and for them, hey, let them have their moment) but neccessary if the writer is ever going to get out of that bed and back to the land of the living.

Think of it as climbing up and down those same three steps in the physical therapy room. They don’t look like they’re going anywhere at first sight. In fact, they can be easily picked up and stashed in a cabinet at the end of the day, and by the tiniest of nurses, too. But up and down them a zillion times a day for however many days, and know what happens? Our writer is finally cleared to go home, the medical staff confident that he/she can traverse the three steps onto the front porch, and more than that, the thirteen steps that connect downstairs to upstairs. Time for a return to business as usual.

To be continued…

Obligatory snow picture

From The Trenches

February 4, 2015February 4, 2015annabowling 2 Comments

I’d meant to have this post up Monday. Then there was Sunday’s snow, Real Life Romance Hero and I both adjusting to not being sick, all family members being home at the same time, and computer issues, and I cannot tell you for the life of me what my original topic was. Really no idea on that one. I have a note somewhere that says “longhand,” but that could be pretty much anything. So today, you get my rambles. Also some assorted pictures that I have no idea what they were originally taken to illustrate. Let me throw them up here and see if I remember.

Okay, here’s one. First cup of tea after cold sore scab dropped. Apparently freedom tastes like cinnamon and star anise. I grabbed that tea bag at random from what we call the orphan jar,. where various teabags go when the rest of their box has been dispatched, were picked up at other venues, received as gifts, etc. Though I haven’t actually played Tea Roultette (you drink what you pick) formally as of yet, it is always a possibility in our house.

Skye’s notebook, surprisingly good pen found at the dollar store. Starbucks mug, because I needed a BIG cup of tea.

Snow:

Snowy Sunday. Cars totally buried, oh the fun.

I put these guys in the front window:

A polar bear, a teddy bear, and a bat live across the street from a bar…

Workspaces:

I trudged out in the whirling white on Sunday, in desperate need of human contact (apart from the human contact I live with; there’s a difference) and broke in a new padfolio. Ivory paper, not white, not yellow. Ivory. Lots of blabber, lots of tea, listened to RWA talks from last year’s Nationals; not bad for a snowy afternoon.

I’d forgotten about the cookie. I think it was pumpkin.

This sign was on the counter where I wrote. I only had a legal pad, so I’m good.

Have I shared this art before?

I like sitting at the small counter facing this window when I write longhand at the coffee house. There’s something about having my back to the world,. a view of art, raw brick and the world outside -best when it’s snow or rain, and there was plenty of snow on Sunday- that feels very comfy and creative.

Today:

Displaced chessmen

There’s a table in the coffee house that has a built in chessboard and Risk board, both very cool, and usually, the chessmen are in place, but, today, they were on a field trip to another table. I think they look like they’re having a fine time.

Do I have any better idea now what I was going to blog about? Nope, but I’m still here. My brain may be mush for anything apart from fiction writing at present, but that’s not entirely a bad thing. Sometimes entertaining for family and friends, but the spaciness is actually a good thing. It means my head is in that story space I’ve wanted it to be in for longer than I would care to admit, and I can’t begrudge that.

Typing With Wet Claws: Under the Weather Edition

January 30, 2015annabowling Leave a comment

Hello, all. Skye here, for another Feline Friday. This has been a big week, mostly because of two things. The first thing is that Anty got sick, and the second thing is that we got snow.

Anty almost never gets sick, but this time, she did. Part of her feeling bad is the thing she calls a bug (I can understand that. I had fleas a long time ago, and I hated that) and part of it is that because of that bug, she cannot have a lot of the things that are good for humans when they are sick and it is cold out. No tea, no orange juice, no soup, no spicy foods. I am glad I eat cat food. That is much easier to figure out.

The one good thing about Anty being sick (please do not tell her I said this, because she might think I am happy when she is sick, and I am not) is that she is at home all of the time. I like having my favorite humans around, and when Anty is on her glowy box, like she is even on sick days, I can sit near her and feel very safe and content. Today, she is painting her claws. I love the smell of claw paint.

Most of the time, though, she is writing in a notebook or on the glowy box. On Monday, she watched Sleepy Hollow and recapped it for Heroes and Heartbreakers. It is here and looks lie this:

Yesterday, she had her planner and calendar and some Sharpies (which also smell very interesting to a kitty) because it was time to update her Coming Soon page. She will be participating in 31 Days & 31 Ways to Jumpstart Your Life, in March, writing one of the daily posts. Her topic will be creativity. She will tell you more about that when it gets closer to March.

On Valentine’s Day (very appropriate for a romance writer,) she will be presenting On Beyond Fanfic, the updated and in person version of her From Fan Fiction to Fantastic Fiction workshop, at Capitol Region Romance Writers. She really loves doing this workshop, and is excited to present it live. I think that may be why she has been watching a lot of DVDs and taking notes this past week.

It may also be because she is grumpy over not being able to get out and have fun in the snow. Snow is her favorite weather, and we got it two times this week. One of those times is today, and it is not done yet. She says she is going to go out and take pictures (and get pizza and tea) as soon as she is better, but she did get one picture on the day it was supposed to snow a lot and only snowed some. Since I am an indoor kitty, and the windows are up high, I have to take her word on this, but this is what it looked like outside our house. Is that a lot of snow? I would not know, as I have never been out in it.

That is about it for this week. As you can imagine, there is a lot for a kitty to do when their human is under the weather, especially in more ways than one. I think I will take a nap by the heater to restore myself, because a kitty’s work is never done.

Until next week, I remain very truly yours,

Skye O’Malley Hart-Bowling
(the kitty, not the book)

Throwback Thursday: Daddy’s Girl?

January 29, 2015January 29, 2015annabowling Leave a comment

I don’t have a date for this book cover, Dad is no longer with us, so I can’t ask, but Amazon says the book was published in 1962. That’s definitely in the pre-Anna days, when I was not yet a glint in my biological father’s eye.

Since I’m adopted, I don’t share any DNA with my father, Rudolph J. Carrasco, but one place where we always had a shared interest was art. Dad was always a working artist through my entire life, both in the commercial field (family friends say he did several book covers around the same time he did Party of Dreamers) and his own original art. As a very small child, I remember seeing him paint over a family portrait of our neighbors (the parents had emigrated from Scotland, which may have been an early contributor to my love of the UK) and not understanding what he was doing, but fast forward a few decades, and we call that mixed media art now. I’ve slapped paint over more than a few pictures myself in my day.

Since the statute of limitations is likely over by now, I can freely confess to sneaking into his studio as a wee sprog and making off with his supplies, always careful to put them back exactly where I found them (paper excepted, and I always remembered where the good stuff was.) I asked him for art instruction. He declined. That may have been for the best, as my taste and his didn’t have a lot of common ground, but, in his later years, he loved when I brought him art magazines while he had hid dialysis treatments, and asked to keep a special issue of Somerset Studio devoted to color theory. Though we had our differences, some of them large, I’m glad we had art in common.

Sicko, pt 2

January 28, 2015annabowling 2 Comments

If I can’t blend in, I may as well be who I am.
–Rainbow Rowell

Two days ago, I ran out of socks. The list of things I want most in life is as follows, in constantly shifting order:

Tea
pizza
orange juice
soup
full use of my entire mouth, including but not limited to :
- ability to wear lipstick again :pets lipsticks:
- ability to brush teeth without having to work around large dome-shaped crust on lower iip.
- expressions of affection to Real Life Romance Hero

Please note that “socks” is not on that list because I dragged myself out to the laundromat this morning and did a load, while listening to recordings from last year’s RWA Nationals. Also free writing while doing both of the above. Even under the weather, multitasking makes me happy.

This post was originally going to be another dip into the archives, with a continuation of my Duluth post, but it’s a big file and would need to be split into two posts, and I’m cranky. See item #1 on the list above. So, instead, I’m going to ramble.

Today’s quote comes from the fabulous Rainbow Rowell, and it fits with my current area of self-directed study. Today’s picture comes from my write-in with SueAnn Porter on Monday. Since we both compose in longhand, we left the laptops at home and instead brought our notebooks. SueAnn worked with one. I brought three, because my brain was all scattered, unfocused and prone to wandering off without me.

SueAnn suggested that our first writing sprint would be brain dumping, which I sometimes call bloodletting, spewing whatever is in my head onto the page. That went in the black hardcover Picadilly, and I’d planned to use my black Pilot Varsity fountain pen for that exercise, but pen had other ideas, and my first page has a small, interestingly shaped blob of ink in the middle. I ended up using a different pen.

Note the absence of tea and presence of a can of seltzer with a straw sticking out of it. The cookie, though labeled as “cookies and cream” was actually red velvet (thank you, Jess-the-Barista, for clearing that up; red velvet makes anything better) and ended up coming home with me, because with the writing and the talking, some things have to take a back seat.

The Abbington Park notebook did not get used in this session, as SueAnn suggested I face my hesitation about working on Her Last First Kiss by doing some character work . Maybe, she suggested, I’m balking at this particular jump because the themes strike too close to home. There is some truth to that. Granted, I do not live in the eighteenth century, am not a member of the nobility and Real Life Romance Hero and I have been happily ever aftering for some time now, so my love life is not as tumultuous as my characters’ romantic prospects.

The thing, though, is that, without knowing it, I had seeded this book with some personal issues. Not fitting into one’s family of origin? Yep, know that. Caregiving? Know that, too. This book isn’t about me; it’s about my hero and heroine, and those really are their issues, and it would change the story into something else entirely were I to take those aspects out and give my people other hurdles to overcome. Well, okay, then. Guess we’re doing this.

Knowing what the roadblocks are doesn’t make them go away, but it does make it possible for me to look at them head on and see how to climb over or dig under them. It’s not a bad thing. Part of that wandering around in the forest time was spent trying, often too hard, to write things to which I did not have a close personal attachment, and that went down in flames, so going to the other end of the spectrum seems like a logical step to take.

Maybe it’s a good thing SueAnn and I had this talk while my brain took frequent mini-vacations without me, because at the end of most of our sprints, I had pen (blue Pilot Varsity) in hand, scratching across the mottled ivory of the page, spelling out how my hero got from adorable cherub child to grown man with seriously warped self image, and responded with, “Really? Already? Are you sure?” and kept making a few more quick notes. Not a bad outcome, that. We’re going to have to have more write-ins like this, but next time, the cold sore is not invited.

Sicko

January 26, 2015annabowling Leave a comment

For most of the last few days, I have been a lump under the blanket in the recliner. On Thursday night, I felt a suspicious tingle on my bottom lip. I’ve had enough of those to know what that meant: cold sore.

I hate cold sores. They’re painful. They’re ugly. They sap my energy. They present a lot of complications for a lipstick loving tea drinker who was looking forward to pizza on Friday night. Until the scab drops, it’s goodbye to all of that and hello to ibuprofen and ointment and a brain whose new hobby is flitting off without me. In a word, not fun. Okay, those were two words.

Because I am me, the need to rest took a while to sink in. Friday, I did laundry and then hied myself off to the local CVS because all the ibuprofen in our house had expired last month. Saturday, I decided that I was feeling up to running the weekly errands with Housemate. I found out fairly quickly into that trip that I was not. I take some comfort in knowing I was mildly entertaining, and that I did have the presence of mind to replace toothbrush and two out of three lip products.

The adventure of Saturday errands over, I retreated to my recliner and blankey, played the Sims 4 game time demo until I’d exhausted the time allotted (will probably get the game with the next computer, but it’s a bit much for the current machine, as well as a more cartoony game than I generally like) watched DVDs, napped a lot, and wrote.

Today, I’m venturing out, ahead of the big snowstorm barreling our way, to meet SueAnn Porter for a write-in. I’m going to miss the tea, mightily, and spend my time sucking seltzer or iced tea, if I can make myself order that when it’s eleven degrees out and we will be buried under a blanket of white by nightfall. I have no idea what I’m actually going to be writing today. Hopefully something Her Last First Kiss related, but if it ends up as freewriting or something else, that’s okay, too. I’m allowed a partial sick day.

Even when I feel like horse poop that’s been crushed by a steamroller, there’s still that part of me that wants to drag out of the energy-free sludge and head off to story world, because that’s my natural environment. So, the HLFK notebook goes into my bag, along with a fountain pen, because writing with those always feels like a special treat, and I’m going to give it a go. Total crash time afterwards, at least until it’s time to recap tonight’s Sleepy Hollow, but tomorrow could be a sick day and a snow day at the same time. Which I will probably spend writing. There could be worse things. Not being able to have hot chocolate while having a sick day and a snow day at the same time may be one of those, but I think I will live. There is something to be said for anticipation.

Throwback Thursday: Duluth, Part One

January 22, 2015annabowling 2 Comments

I sometimes forget the lessons of my past. We all have them. But don’t worry they come back to remind you that your journey isn’t over.
-Adrian Paul

I normally don’t do Throwback Thursday, but blogging three times per week is one of my goals, and since I am not going to show up at my next CR-RWA meeting (especially because I will be the speaker) on February 14th and say I did not meet my goals (if I make a goal public, I will meet that or die trying; it’s something I do) and because Sue Ann Porter has a way of encouraging me, today, you get to hop in my wayback machine.

The year was 2013, our family newly arrived in Albany, my writer brain in a constant state of shock and caught between projects. I had only recently discovered the joys of Hudson River Coffee House, where I am writing this entry. On this particular day, date lost to the wilds of time, Housemate banished me there after one of my mild freakouts (“What on earth am I doing, thinking I can write anymore?” variety) and said I had to write something. So, there was this:

2012 was one of those years. Family health issues. Planning and carrying out an interstate move when one family member was not physically able to make any of the apartment hunting trips. Carrying out said move in stages, one of them involving sending one family member into a hurricane to carry out said stage solo because another did not want a third anxiety attack that week. A first trip to the hospital from our new home. Changes in important relationships. Buying a second snow shovel because we live in Albany and it’s winter and one shovel is not going to dig us out properly.

2013 is an unknown quantity. I’m letting one ms settle and diving into another. It scares me. What on earth am I getting myself into? Fear. The bad kind. Fear. The good kind.

What’s the difference between the two? Good question. When I find out, I will let you know, but I’ll give it a stab (and stabbing does seem like a good option at times, the object of which can vary.)

Bad fear = what if every bad thing anybody ever said about my writing is true? What if it’s true and I have no other marketable skills? What if I really do suck? What if I suck and there was something I could have done to not suck but I didn’t do it and now it’s too late to fix it because I really do suck and it’s all my fault? What if I have to live with the wanting to write and the needing to write and never being able to write for the rest of my life ? DOOM! DOOM!DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!

Good fear = I have never done X before, but it could be fun. Am I really doing it right?

:pokes X with a stick, then scuttles back a safe distance to observe:

:comes back, presuming the poking of X did not result in personal death or obliteration of all humankind; pokes X again. Repeat until done, then poke something else.:

Do I have all the answers? No. Do I have my answers? Maybe. Let me look around the bottom of my purse a while longer. Or fumble my way through manuscript B and occasionally poke A with a stick. There is fear, both kinds. There are times I feel like I can’t find my way back to my normal writing self any more than I can find my way to Apartment Four, 738 North Anything Street in Duluth, Minnesota. At night. In a snowstorm. On foot. Wearing earplugs. During a blackout. In the zombie apocalypse. One thing is sure, though; if I never take one step, I’ll never get there.

So. This is a step. Today, I wrote. Is it a completed work of fiction between eighty and one hundred thousand words in my chosen genre? No. Is it real? Yes. Is it true? Yes. Is it finished? Yes. Did it bring me one step closer to that mythical apartment in Duluth? Yes. Are the residents expecting me? Maybe. I’ll find out when I get there. So will you. We all have a Duluth. I firmly believe that, and I firmly beleive that putting one foot in front of the other will eventually get you there. Maybe you’re on the right track now, and maybe you’ll need to circle the world a time or two, but the surest way to make sure you never get there is to not try. Right foot, left foot. Right foot, left foot. Right foot, left foot. Dress in layers. Stay hydrated. Rest, and then continue. Fill the well. Write something. Ask for directions. Right foot, left foot. Right foot, left foot. See you there.

This Time, It’s The N

January 21, 2015annabowling Leave a comment

It’s not a race. It’s finding your voice. You’re okay. Now get off that ledge, give yourself a day off, feed your soul with something that brings you joy and sit back down from a place of peace. You’re a writer. You’re fine. You have all the time in the world.
-Beth Treadway

Well, I knew it had to happen sometime. We have had the first casualty, or should I say, sign of wear, on the new external keyboard. The bottom part of the N, I noticed as I sat down for the morning’s session, is not as there as it used to be. I take that as a source of pride. I’ve been pounding keys enough to wear away letters on this new keyboard. As I started typing this entry, I noticed that the L is looking shaky on the bottom as well. Not too shabby, getting those letters, well, um, shabby.

Wearing the letters off keys may be the computer equivalent of emptying pens, which I have also been doing. I’d say filling notebooks as well, but maybe that’s more like using up memory with accumulated files. Maybe? Maybe not? I’m not sure that everything translates like that, but that’s not where I’m putting my mental energy these days.

The first part of this week was consumed by domestic tornadoes of the sort that make one exclaim, “Really, life? Really?” Along with a few other strong words. Second half of the week looks better, with a new opportunity that may be in the offing, but let’s get back to the first part, which fits very well with today’s quote. There are going to be times in every writer’s life when the world goes crazy. That’s not an if, that’s a when, and it’s going to happen to everybody. Accepting that makes it easier to handle, I’ve found.

The last few years, the last year, and the last couple of days have made me realize how much a part of me writing actually is. It’s been a dedicated search to find my voice again, and find the process that works for the writer and the person I am now. There’s some wandering around in the woods still, but there are trail markers, and those are all worthy of celebration. It’s not a race (unless there’s a deadline, but that’s a good thing) and it’s okay to take the time to do it right.

Head down, eyes on my own paper. I got this. I know how to write a book. I know how to write a romance novel. I may not have a muse, but I do have a magpie, and she is happily gathering shiny things; books and movies and songs and scents and flashes of scenes and I am getting all of this down. Emptying pens. Filling notebooks. Rubbing the letters off computer keys. Putting story where there was no story before. That’s progress.

The bottom bar of that L key is going down.

Typing With Wet Nails

for the love of romance

personal