Aw spring, my favorite time of the year is finally here. Budding new birth everywhere you look. People taking inventory, spring cleaning, clearing out cobwebs and clutter of their lives. As a girl, we started every spring by opening the windows and letting fresh air blow through the house removing the winter's stale air. Then, we moved down mama's list, decluttering closets, washing windows until they sparkled. We whitewashed scuff marks off baseboards, mopped, waxed, and polished the hard-wood floors until they shined.
It was an exhausting time for me and my sisters, one we always dreaded, until lying on our beds late at night we inhaled the smell of a freshly spring-cleaned house as the breeze stirred the sheer curtains and the sounds of crickets serenaded us to sleep.
Some things are worth the hard work.
So it is with writing...
You outline a novel and fill in the plot or like some do, fly by the seat of your pants until you reach the end of the story and a satisfactory word count. Of course, I'm over simplifying, but you get my drift. When things need to be done you do them and cross them off your list. Not unlike when I was young and checking off mama's spring cleaning to-do-list .
Perhaps you've wondered why no one was minding the Cow Pasture. Suffice to say, I was hard at work. Not writing, but working on something much harder so I could get back to writing - my health.
In 1983, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, Sjogren's syndrome and others, but over the last five years, things had stabilized. I thought I had this plot figured out, so to speak, but then what's a good story without a twist, right? After many years of being manageable, the sleeping giant began attacking my central nervous system. Talk about a twist I wasn't expecting, this was it. I didn't know how to talk or write about what was happening, even in the Cow Pasture.
Over the last six months instead of working on my novel,
blog or writing short stories, I've been outlining a plan to combat this
disease and improve my outcome. I'm happy to say things are on track.
Some things are worth the hard work.
I'm writing again, not using many outlines or sticking to a strict schedule, but writing when I can. Musing from the Cow Pasture Chronicles may include exerts from my novels, Hello Hell, Call Me Florence, a short story, flash fiction, writing topic, an opinion piece, or a chapter from my memoir. Who knows what I'll share, I'm pretty much a panster these days.
Some things are meant to be enjoyed.
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