Saturday

The usual things for the weekend are lining up this morning for consideration. Largest on the hit parade of things to do is to reconcile the checkbook. Next is laundry and the ironing I never seem to get around to. I need to cut out business cards for 2 folks at work, which needs to be done early on because my back just can’t take it later on in the day. I really, really need to get my next article done for my newsletter. I should pay attention to the folks who want reciprocal links for the helpself directory and lastly, the one I think I’ve bitten off a chunk too large with is to start editing my book.

Instead, all I want to do is read the library book I checked out by Linda Lael Miller, “McKettrick's Choice”. One of my own fears, and it is a large one, with writing is that I would write drivel. The guides pointed out to me this morning as I was reading and thinking envious thoughts that I didn’t like to read drivel and the likelihood of me writing it, or at least allowing it to remain on the page, wouldn’t be too great. Of course, drivel could be one of those subjective things…it’s not drivel to one person, but drivel to another.

The drivel I wrote before languishes under the bed. And, yet, as awkward as that writing was, as forced as it was in places, that book holds a place in my heart as my, “first born”. I don’t have children. I was thinking about it last night as I do many times and will probably do so until the day I die. But, I thought a long time ago that my books would be my children. Except I don’t have any of those either. Just the one that never made it past manuscript pages in a box under my bed. Does an unpublished manuscript qualify as a book? Well, probably a lot of people would say not. But, I do.

That’s the book where I learned how characters can come to life. I learned what it feels like to have a plan, an itinerary for the book and how the characters can just start doing their own thing deviating from the plan, and yet, it all comes out right in the end. I learned what it feels like to have a writer’s high, very much like a runner’s high, where you’ve attained a meditative state doing something you love to do, where you’ve lost all track of time and are surprised to see when you rouse yourself 15 minutes later that 2 hours have passed on by.