Saturday Night Silliness -- Random Musings of a Writer Lady and Her Cat.

As we begin walking Earnest’s phone begins to ring. He looks at the display. “I have to take this. I’ll catch up with you?” He asks. I nod and with a turn begin walking away. Slowly, but not so slowly that I can overhear. I am not sure if it is out of a need to be polite or because Earnest is a hallucination and I don’t want to add any more details to the mess that has emerged so far. The less that I know at this moment will make things easier later. You know, when I’m in the nut house and they're deciding on treatment, not hearing his conversation may save me from electric shock therapy or something worse. Can it get worse than electric shock therapy?   I walk at my chosen pace and find calming thoughts. When I hear his footsteps come up behind me and feel him come into step at my side I start asking questions. “So what is it that you do for a living?” “What does it look like I do for a living?” An irritated voice asks. I turn and find myself looking at the groun

After a few moments, I feel like I can breathe a little better. I look around. People are still smiling and walking around me. No one is showing concern. I must be hiding things well. I need to get out of the way, find a quiet place. There’s a park close by. Where? I join the rest of the foot traffic and head east. I walk two...no three blocks. I turn to the left and find the open space of the park and notice a narrow trail on the far side of the parking lot. I take it. A pair of kids ride up the trail on their bikes in front of me. I follow quickly hoping to find a secluded spot and end up on the outer fringe of a rose garden. This must be part of the museum grounds. There’s a stand of shade trees and a bench at the garden’s entrance. The bench is empty until I claim it. As I sit down, the panic that I have been holding back pushes forward. The waitress’ words echo in my mind, “He left. Ten minutes ago.” Oh my god, I was talking to someone who wasn’t ther

There’s a famous quote about writing: Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed.     Last night upon arriving home from work, I counted the days before my next blog post and I realized that the two weeks that I had so looked forward to in which I planned on finishing “Untitled” had quickly evaporated. It was time to push that puppy out and my project was due tomorrow. I put on my work clothes and angrily proceeded to mow my yard. It was hot but the heat index was predicted to shoot up dangerously high on Saturday and I wanted to see the work done before then. As I said. I angrily mowed my entire yard. Taking stock of everything that put me in this position, after five minutes, yep the storms are big but they tend to be short these days, I began to look at what was really keeping progress from being made. I was blocked. Yes, blocks do exist. Not in the way most people imagine. But I am one of the writers that knows first hand that writer’s block does exist. 

I woke up to one of the greatest gifts that I could have hoped for this morning. I am not sure how to describe it. About six years ago, I decided that I got so much enjoyment out of writing that I wanted to make a conscious effort to hone my skills. I wanted to treat it like a second job. I wanted to do the work and find a way to make my way in this world as a writer. I cut back on the baking, I put away the quilting, I put less thought to fun activities and focused as much of my life as possible to telling good stories. I also set up a five year plan. A plan to be supporting myself with my writing at the end of five years. Five years came and went. The ultimate goal had not been reached. I kept at it. I decided that if I dedicated myself more fully to the work things would happen for me as I had planned. I started thinking about changes. Am I doing too much of what everyone else is doing? Is it just the wrong time? Am I just not very good at this? Going into year