Routine and the painful process

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Something came up today so I won’t be able to write.

While not being able to write for one day isn’t the end of the world, it does frustrate me a bit. My grasp on the writing routine is tenuous at best. I love to write, but I seem to embrace every chance to play hooky that comes along.

The problem is that I’m not much of a routine person. In fact, I kind of hate routines.

Too bad they are so useful!

A good routine helps me get things done and actually reach my goals.

My goal at the moment is simply to get this book completed.

Right now I feel:
I’ve been working on this book FOREVER.
I’ll NEVER finish it!
I HATE it!
I’m SICK of writing it.
Why did I EVER start it in the first place?

It’s all part of giving birth to a book. It’s a painful process.

My records show that I began these rewrites March of this year.
But I had a detailed, ten page outline of the book dated February of 2013.
There was lots, and lots, and lots of writing in between.

So yeah, forever.

Titles

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Titles are some of the most irritating things ever invented. By that I don’t mean the titles themselves – a clever title can attract the right kind of attention – I mean the belief that a piece of writing isn’t complete until that all-important label is in place.

Who’s the genius, anyway, who decided every writer needed to sum up their entire book or screenplay in a few measly words?

Bleh!

I realize that I’ve never been particularly good at coming up with titles, but this latest book is really giving me problems.

Oh, I can think of titles galore. I have a long list of them that I look through every so often.

But none of them are right. They don’t fit.

It’s like when you need a new pair of shoes. You go to your favorite shoe store, confident that you can select the perfect pair in just a few minutes. But the first pair is too small and the second the wrong color. An hour later there you are, frustrated, beside an embarrassingly tall pile of discarded choices. Your only hope is that the mess gets cleaned up before your friends see you or some unwary soul gets too close and causes an avalanche.

For me, the worst part about not having a title is that it feels like I’m driving with the parking brake engaged. I’m moving, but I can feel the drag of the brakes.

If I could find that perfect title, I could release the brake and get up to highway speed.

I’d love to feel the wind whipping through my hair as I cruised to the end of the book.

Titles. Bleh! Bleh! Bleh!

Rain

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It’s raining.
I want the rain to stop.
It fogs my brain.
Makes me want to curl up in a ball and sleep.
It blurs my thoughts.
But not just mine.
A bird hit my living room window five times this morning.
Five times.
Five times the poor creature flew on a clear path to safety.
Right into my dirty window.
BAM!
I want the rain to stop.
It’s raining.

rain

Soup dream

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Ever had a dream you dismiss a nonsense dream, until you really think about it?

I just had a very weird one.

In the dream a large group of people came over for dinner. I had expected two people, but those two had decided to bring a few more, so I had ten extra people sitting around my table waiting to be fed.

Gulp! It might not be a true nightmare, but it would certainly freak me out if it happened in real life!

Anyway, the only thing I could come up with on the spur of the moment was soup. So I brought a big pot of soup to the table and started serving.

I must have overestimated how much I had because I was a little too generous with the first servings. The last people got just a few tablespoons in their bowls.

But that’s not the worst part. The soup I’d chosen to serve only had two ingredients, lettuce and water. Yep, I’d dumped several heads of iceberg lettuce into a big pot of water, brought it to a boil, and called it dinner.

Yuck!

Anyway, the dream disturbed me more than it should, so I sat down and thought it through. I needed to figure why I was so bothered by such a silly little dream.

It was easier to figure out than I thought it would be. Probably because I know my own mind pretty well.

I’ve been very lax this summer, letting pretty much everything cut into my writing time. Family, the kitchen remodel, the dog, sunshine, yard work, you name it, I’ve let it disrupt my schedule.

My brain is smart enough to know it’ll starve without some real writing time.

Just like I was starving my guests with that lettuce soup.

Now that I realize what’s going on in my noggin, it’s up to me to feed the hungry creature inside my head. Time to put my writing fingers to work and cook up something nourishing for my brain to enjoy.

Let’s hope I can come up with something more substantial than lettuce soup!

Hotel Monte Vista

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We spent two nights in a haunted hotel, and saw…well…nothing. I guess the ghosts weren’t in the mood for a chat, or a thump, or whatever those ghosts are known to do.

I’ll admit that I didn’t sleep well, which some people say is a sign of ghostly presence.

But those people probably weren’t taking into account the Karoake bar downstairs. That was one loud hotel!

Frankly, I might have gotten a decent amount of sleep if the ghost had made itself useful and plugged my ears with its ghostly fingers.

But the ghost refused to be so kind. So sleep was sporadic, and when I dreamed, it was of distressed cats howling in the distance.

I wonder why?

 

Mundane or hero

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Okay, I’m just going to say it. They’ve got it all wrong. And by they I mean the writers of all those books, tv shows, and movies that spout the message that being a hero is a lonely, sad existence.

Sure, it makes for good drama. The audience feels the the hero’s soul-scaring loneliness and a connection is forged. All of us feel a little lonely sometime. We can relate.

But it’s carried out too far. We, the audience, may yearn for the hero’s happiness, but deep in our hearts we know it’ll never happen. Time and again we’ve witnessed heroes win wars with muscle, only to lose everything on the emotional front.

We’ve seen it so often it has become ingrained in our culture. A hero must be sad and alone. That’s the way it is.

Nonsense. We’re letting ourselves be deluded by some lonely soul in the distant past who had problems with relationships and did a Tom Sawyer to cover it up.

Only chance to be happy is to be mundane?
Don’t you believe it!

Be a HERO.
Have FRIENDS.
Fall in LOVE, you gorgeous hero you.
You’ll be HAPPY you did.

 

Road trip adventure – Bedrock (Arizona)

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Next stop, Bedrock.

That’s right. It’s possible to visit the land of the Flintstones, right in Arizona!

We didn’t know exactly what to expect. It added 40 miles to the trip, so when we pulled into the parking lot we were disappointed. Sure there were a couple of Bedrock-looking buildings and a dinosaur, but not enough for the long drive.

Until we noticed that one of the buildings (the only one we could actually go inside) was a diner. We knew we had a long drive before we got anywhere else, so we decided to see what they had to eat.

Duh! It was the entrance into Bedrock! The parking lot was thankfully just that, a parking lot.

We paid our entrance fee and went inside. I’m so glad we did!

Because what we found was the entire town of Bedrock. Houses, playground, school, theater, gas station, post office, cars, dinosaurs, doctor’s office, jail, etc. Whatever you’d expect in a town, it was there.

Bedrock playground.  0512161723Gas Station

The insides of the buildings were staged appropriately. So the doctor’s office had giant teeth, and the post office looked ready for a town meeting.Post Office Doctor's office

I wonder what this guy did to get this long of a jail sentence?

JailMy very favorite part was the Goatasaurus’s that housed the cutest, friendliest little goat you’ve ever seen!

Goatasaurus'sGoatasaurus

Maaaa!

Off to London! Bridge, that is.

Road trip adventure – meteor crater

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Lately I’ve been feeling a little stagnant. Like I need to see more of the world.

After all, a writer needs to experience the world in order to write about it.

So instead of flying my daughter home from college, I flew out to Arizona and we drove back to Seattle.

That’s right, your eyes are not deceiving you. We drove. An old fashioned road trip. Through deserts, mountains, forests, and very small towns. Just the two of us.

The mission:
Experience as many quirky/interesting sites as possible and still get home in less than a week. And in case you’re wondering, to find the quirky things you need to take the road less traveled.

So that’s what we did.

Our first stop was a meteor crater, which we found to be more educational than quirky. But hey, you have to start somewhere, even if it is with a giant dent in the earth.

crater

 

Out of the blue

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I was taking a bath when out of the blue this conversation popped into my head.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m doing what I should have done a long time ago. I’m making a hole in the universe big enough to send you home.”

Where this odd little piece of dialog came from I haven’t a clue, nor do I know what I’m supposed to do with it. All of a sudden it was just there, clear and firmly implanted in my brain.

Hmm.