Hanging with my Peeps

I don’t know who wrote that they could tell spring was here because they’d seen Peeps in the store (yellow chicks only for me, thank you), but I know spring is here when I get to hang with my Peeps at Southern Exposure Herb Farm, southernmoon.com. If you’ve never been there, sign up for a class and go. A couple of dear friends and I will be there this Friday night for a wine tasting dinner. Let’s see, friends, wine, dinner and Southern Exposure.

It’s spring.

Forecast

I’m going to hedge my bet a bit here and forecast - WEATHER. That’s right, I forecast that we will have weather. We’ll have days of rain, possibly still a bit of snow, and then the flowers will bloom. Overcast days with shafts of sunlight poking through. Brilliant sunny, blue sky days. Days when we laugh at the shapes we see in the clouds. Clear nights with the stars diamond-studding the darkness. We’ll have days when people complain about the heat and days they complain about the cold, we’ll have soft warm breezes that ruffle the daisies and fierce winds that flatten the grass. There will be sudden downpours. There will be hail. There will be Warnings! There will be the day we see the first robin, the first bud on the lilac bushes, the first leaf changing in the fall. There will be perfect days we remember always in our mental scrapbook, days we bank against those times of far less than perfect. There will be days we share with friends and days we hug to ourselves. There will be days when the Weather and the Warnings mean we change our plans. There will be days when the rain doesn’t come after all and the picnic isn’t cancelled. There will be days and nights and days of weather.

My forecast is for weather.

Goals

I’d hoped to have at least six pieces of fiction out at once at some point this year. I’ve got SEVEN out right now! I feel like an Olympian.

By the way, a big shout out to Canada for winning gold medals while hosting the Olympics. I love it when the neighbors do well.

Silly Reigns Today

I've done something silly. Well, two things really. To be honest, I've done a lot more than two, but today I'm only going to admit to two things. Both concern cabinet cards (old studio-posed photos on heavy card stock) that I've framed and that keep me company here in my office. I laugh myself silly every time I look at them. The reason I laugh myself silly is because I've added captions to each one, typed and attached to the front of the glass below the photos.

The first:
The caption for a photo of a perfectly respectable older lady in a high collared dress, gray hair pulled back wearing glasses and the loveliest hint of a smile.
"Her smile conveyed the accumulation of decades of happiness, months of family holidays, two weeks of a very well-spent honeymoon, a certain weekend in Chicago and a recipe for rum cake."

The second:
The caption for a photo of five women in Victorian dress grouped together as one appears to read to the others from a letter. When I saw this photo I had my idea of what the letter might read.
"Congratulations! We're very happy to accept for publication your chilling tale of revenge ad murder, Gruesome Tidings at Asylum Lake."

Ta and da.

.........counting down to 2010

Looking back, I didn’t have any epic fails concerning my resolutions for 2009 except for leaving the country. Didn’t make it out of the States. Hmmmm, maybe I’m more of a homebody than I thought! The writing went well, though I didn't finish the new mystery. I entered a writing contest, worked hard and polished several short stories as well as having a good outline for the new mystery. We did a lot more entertaining than in years past and loved it. I worked on my own hooked rug patterns and found that doing so frees the mind to think and juggle ideas and find better ways to express what I want in my writing. Still, the biggest thing to happen this year was the change in my thinking because of my emergency appendectomy. I might not have done the writing or anything else if I hadn’t finally realized how much I want to do and how little freaking time there might be in which to do it. I’m not in a position to give up work, and I actually love what I do, but I did turn down additional work at the end of the year. I made the decision to work less and write more, work less and entertain more, work less and live more.

For 2010, I’m going to blend resolutions with the determination to take the time to do what I need to do. Not make the time or find the time, but take it.

Finish the new mystery
Send out the old mystery (thanks, Em, for the kick in the pants about this).
Create a new hooked rug to enter into the 2011 KIA community art show.
Actually use the Wii fitness stuff.
Send out the short stories to find their way and place in the world.
Entertain more.
Go to a writers’ conference.

To quote Rainer Maria Rilke, “And now let us welcome the New Year, full of things that have never been.”

Thankful

For friends, for family and for the fact that the family, young and old, is better after needing various surgeries this past year. I’m thankful for our pets. I’m thankful for a lovely Thanksgiving when we had a new voice in our home. I’m also thankful I took the advice in my last post. I have nearly 16,000 words on the mystery, a short story polished until it is gleaming, plus serious work on a second short story.

Lots for which to be thankful!

Musings on musings

I had an amazing conversation with the amazing Em the other night. We talked of writing and of motivation, what works, what doesn’t and what we do or don’t do to get our butts in the chair to write. Our conversation touched on some BIG THINGS, namely how creativity begets creativity and how sitting on the sofa mindlessly watching television that is not well written enough to justify our attention ain’t getting it done. I’m so much better than I used to be, but....

I’m one of the world’s great dreamers. I talking epic dreams here. Dreams I’ve decided must come true. Ah, there’s the rub. I’ve focused on the DECIDING they must come true without putting focus on the doing what needs to be done for them to come true.

I’m also a doer, but not one of the world’s great ones. Part of the problem, maybe the biggest part, is one of lack of desperation. I like my house, my husband, my family, my friends, my work and my income. I’ve become complacent.

So, it comes down to finding where desperation lives inside me. Where’s the big terror? And when I examine this thought, I know exactly where terror and desperation live. For me, they live in that horrible place of passing time. Passing, passing, passing. Every day, every hour, every moment passing.

There’s an old saying, Five frogs were sitting on a log. Two decided to jump off. How many were left? Five. This is the difference between deciding and doing.

So, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go do.