Sarah Wynde's Blog, page 68

Houses and quilts and other stuff

The first people to look at my house made an offer.

I accepted.

And then their financing fell through.

It was what you might call a whirlwind of emotions. I’m not fussing about it, but it inspired me to live in my house very mindfully this weekend, enjoying the pool, appreciating the lanai*, and taking full advantage of the laundry room.

I’ve determined that I’m going to leave this house with all quilts and blankets as clean as possible: I’m not thinking about the fact that an RV doesn’t have a ton of room for blankets and so I should be probably be deciding which ones need to get donated. I own a lot of quilts. Maybe I’ll do a post of quilt pictures and let you help me decide? But mostly my choices will be between presentable vs extraordinarily well-worn and ragged, but incredibly nostalgic. For example, I own a quilt my mom made with her grandma for her wedding. It’s purple and red, ripped along one side, very lightweight, and more than fifty years old. Put that up against the perfectly serviceable blue and green quilt I picked up at Bed, Bath & Beyond a few years ago and there’s a practical decision and the decision that I will undoubtedly make. But I sort of suspect that I’ll be keeping all the quilts when I leave and making the hard decisions only when I am forced to it by the lack of space in my future new home.

And who knows when that will be? After my first showing turned into my first offer, I thought this process would be quick, but no one else has even looked at the place yet, so maybe not so much. That’s probably fortunate because I have a lot to do before I leave. (Ahem, like, write a book? Yeah, that.) I’m not stressing, though. A time for everything and everything in its time. And now it’s time to write!

*Lanai: So it turns out, in Florida, there are specific terms for those outside spaces adjacent to one’s house. They’re not all just patios. My outside space has no walls but is covered, so apparently it’s a lanai. If it weren’t covered but was paved, it would be a patio. If it was made of wood, not covered, it would be a deck. If it… well, follow the link on the term to read all the variations. But I may have to go through all my Tassamara books looking at the porches. Apparently the Southerners might have called them verandas. I figure I’m fine in Akira’s point-of-view, because she — like me — probably had no idea of these fine distinctions, but I suspect Natalya should have. Not that I’m going to make any changes, it would just be interesting to know where I got it wrong.

Showing the house

In twenty minutes, I’m putting the leashes on the dogs and taking them for a walk in what I hope is not the rain, so that some total stranger can wander through my house, considering whether they’d like to live in it. Such a weird feeling! Wistful and worried, anxious and yet, curiously relaxed. I love my house and it’s okay with me if these people do, too, and it’s okay with me if they don’t.

This is my first house, probably my last, although one never knows what the future will bring. (In my case, unless it brings me a partner who wants to do yard work, this is my last house.) My bucket list from over fifteen years ago — found while sorting stuff — included “live in a place that feels like home” and I do. One checkmark.

It will be so strange to leave it. And yet, adventure awaits. I need to figure out a way to record names of campgrounds, names of places to visit. I’m following all these fun RV blogs in my RSS feed now and it feels like there’s so much to see. I keep reminding myself that really what I plan to do is find a nice place to sit for a while, then sit and write, then find another nice place to sit. This adventure is supposed to include many, many words.

First, though, I need to finish Grace. I wonder if I can squeeze in another 100 words before time for my walk? I should try. Or maybe I should wander my house, eying the floors critically and seeing if there’s one more spot I can scrub, one more pile of Bartleby fur hiding in the corners.

Mother’s Day

On Saturday, I was bracing myself for the Mother’s Day blues.

Five years ago, I didn’t see my mom on Mother’s Day. I called her, I expect, but I didn’t do flowers or a card or a gift — I was in grad school, quitting my job, life was busy. I didn’t know, because we so rarely do, that it would be our last holiday. I don’t feel guilty about that — she would scoff at me if I did. But I do think of her and miss her more on the holiday. At the best of times, it’s still a teary holiday for me. And this year, R was busy with finals, so I expected a solitary day. As I said, bracing myself.

Instead, there was an after-dark knock on the door on Saturday evening. I went to answer it with trepidation, that sense of ‘uh-oh, who could that be?’ But yay! It was R, home to surprise me, and a delightful surprise it was.

Instead of my solitary day, I made us a big breakfast and then we headed off to our annual Mother’s Day super-hero movie tradition. We saw Captain America: Civil War, which was unexpectedly good. I’d been careful not to read or see anything about it — I actually didn’t want to be spoiled, because my expectations were so low. I usually don’t mind spoilers, but in this case, I anticipated that spoilers would reveal things that would make me unhappy and I didn’t want to dread the movie, if that makes any sense. But it was surprisingly enjoyable and far more fun than I expected it to be.

Afterwards, he worked on his final papers and I thought about Grace. Didn’t write a word, but did finally decide to go backwards again. R came into my room at one point and I told him I was debating throwing the whole thing away and he forbid it, very sternly, so I guess I’m not doing that. But the last six weeks of words just don’t work for me, so I’ve deleted them from my file (saving them, of course, for when I change my mind again) and am starting over again from the point where I think it stopped working. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to re-use some parts, but I’m going to work on writing it as if it’s a clean slate.

Meanwhile, a friend taught me to knit on Saturday, so I have been knitting and thinking and knitting and thinking. No words written (unless I count these) but at least I’m not feeling frozen anymore which is how I spent the last week. I’m trying to remind myself to put progress before perfection, like a good positive discipline parent.

But I’m also thinking that maybe knitting would be a good metaphor for how I should be treating writing. Because in my knitting, I’m trying really hard to focus on process, not product. I finished off my first skein of yarn, and then I ripped it all out and started over. Not because I was worried about it not being good enough, but because the point of knitting for me is not to produce usable objects, but to have the mindful meditative process. I’m trying to find flow states, not create scarves. Maybe I should be treating my writing the same way. The goal isn’t to produce an end result that follows other people’s rules of storytelling and satisfies every single person who ever picks it up — the goal is to love what I do while I’m doing it.

Process, not product. It feels right. So now let’s see what the words are like when my only goal is to enjoy writing them.

4AM Bargains

There was a mosquito in my bedroom last night.

I tried bargaining with it. I promised that if it sat on my skin, I wouldn’t flinch, I wouldn’t move, I would just hold still and let it stuff itself on my blood. I swore it could have a full pint of the good stuff.

I offered to set up a plate of water, shallow and non-filtered. Even rainwater, if that would be better for its little eggs. Anything, everything, whatever it wanted or needed, I would give it its heart’s desire (do mosquitoes have hearts?) if it would just SHUT THE EFF UP.

It didn’t.

My crankiness level would be sky-high, since I’ve been unhappily awake since 4AM, except that it is a gorgeous day, sunny and cool with a light breeze. And I have two adorable dogs who are wandering around the backyard appreciating the weather. B, especially, likes the temperature, I think. He’s a lot more active on cool days than hot, when he tends to lie underneath pieces of furniture with his tongue out.

Oh, people who know more about plants than I do: what is this plant?

I should know its name but I can’t remember it. I bought it to put on the front porch, but it lasted for two days out there, miserable and droopy at the end of every day, so I decided it needed less sun. I moved it to the patio and it’s been so flourishing ever since that I almost wish I wish I could keep it. I’m death on plants, so I’m not going to — it’ll go live with some safer person when the house sells — but I’m pleased that it’s happy at the moment. But I wish I knew what it was.

Writing is going so horribly that I’m being extremely mean to myself. Hmm, that sentence might be backwards. I’m being extremely mean to myself so writing is going horribly? Which is cause and which is effect? Tough to say. But I’m on the fourth version of the scene that I’ve been working on for the past week. I manage about six hundred words, then delete them.

I keep coming up with ideas for why it’s so hard, things I’ve forgotten to consider, plot holes, characterization issues — but I seriously wish I was done with this book. Last night — before the mosquito — I told myself that I just needed to do a writing binge. To treat this like a school assignment with five days before a deadline that would prevent me from graduating, or a magazine deadline where the issue is going to press with blank pages that would lose me my job. Then I met my friendly neighborhood mosquito and instead of writing-binging this morning, I’ve mostly been drinking coffee and playing solitaire and waiting for a plumber to arrive. That counts as work, right? Waiting for a plumber? Yeah, I thought not. But as soon as he’s here (or she, I don’t mean to be sexist in my gender assumptions about plumbers), I will settle into writing. Words will get written. Real ones. Meanwhile, though, I will keep drinking coffee and enjoying the weather.

To-do lists

I looked at my to-do list and with the exception of one ridiculous item — finish writing this damn book — it is very close to being completed. Most of the items on it are either things that I am waiting on someone else to do or things that are optional. For example, wash all the windows. Well, that’s a nice idea, because clean windows look good. But if I don’t get around to washing all the windows and someone doesn’t buy the house because the windows weren’t clean, they probably weren’t someone who needed a thirty-year old house anyway.

Yesterday’s chores included buying six bags of mulch and spreading it on my front garden; organizing books and items in the garage and taking a load of books to the library donation spot; going to Lowe’s and buying lightbulbs for the overhead kitchen lights, then dragging out the big ladder to change the two that were burned out; scrubbing my bathtub to within an inch of its life (it’s still doesn’t look spotless, but it never will); and much playing and splashing with the dogs.

The last part was fun. It was a beautiful first day of May and the water was perfect. B, I think, finally really likes swimming as long as I’m close to him. He’s like a toddler in the water, running around all excited on the edge, then super-cautious about how he puts his paws in, then always checking back to make sure he hasn’t gotten too far away from safety. And Z, of course, loves the pool and playing with her basketball.

2016-04-26 13.06.13

It definitely gave me pangs about giving it up. I had the gloomy thought of “I will never find another house that I love as much as this one.” French doors to the patio, high ceilings, my window seat, my kitchen cabinets… and then I thought, yes, this is true, I will never again have to be responsible for yard work or worry about termites. Leaks I will have to worry about — apparently, water is the big problem for RVs and getting a leak is both eventually inevitable and the problem that you have to watch out for. Yes, I’ve been doing lots of reading about RVs.

Today’s goals: finish the damn book. But that brings me back to my original thoughts on writing — that goal never moves, because I’ve made it too overwhelming. I need to make it a series of smaller goals. So today’s goal: finish the scene I’m in, write the next one, figure out what happens in the one after that. And, at least temporarily, let go of worrying about the house and the RV and the future and all the things that are driving me away from the story, and concentrate on Grace.

Ironically, I thought my trip to Sarasota on Friday would be really great plotting time to finalize the order of these last scenes and maybe get some real words imagined but I spent most of it daydreaming about Fen. She’s having such great adventures in my head. I seriously am so looking forward to getting back to writing about her. First, though, Grace. And even before that, a Monday morning, a dog walk, some healthy breakfast, and so on. The fingers are warmed up and ready to go!

Overthinking

At some point, I’m going to sit back and think about what I’ve learned from Grace. I’m not sure yet what it is. Not to have too many characters? Not to let side characters steal the show? To stick to an outline instead of abandoning it? To put more time into planning? Except I put a ton of time into planning with Grace. I thought I knew exactly where I was going, I just could never figure out how to get there.

I think probably the most important thing for me is that I really need to stop overthinking. I never considered plot or structure or character arcs with Ghosts and it’s entertaining nonetheless. And A Lonely Magic was a seven-week whirlwind where I never knew what was coming next and I adore it. Somehow the “write like mad without too much thinking” is my best strategy, I just need to figure out how to do it successfully without letting myself get turned around too much.

So yes, still working on Grace, finally starting to see a little forward movement instead of spinning my wheels. I don’t even know what revision I would call this now, maybe seven? And, of course, this is all before my usual multiple revision rounds that are edit rounds, not rewrites. Ah, well. I persevere! (It’s a character strength. :))

I’m persevering on the house, too. It’s not yet 10AM and I’ve checked off another item on the to-do list, namely clean and paint the trim on the patio. While I was at it, I wandered around to the front and touched up some of the trim out there and discovered — ridiculously belatedly — that the trim around the new windows by the door (sidelights, they’re called) was light blue. Seriously, what planet have I been on for the past month? I was berating myself for my lack of observational skills while I painted the blue white, to go with the rest of the trim, but then I realized, or maybe remembered, that I actually have excellent observational skills, as long as what I’m observing is people. Trim color does not interest me, not even when it’s on my own house, which is why I shouldn’t be a homeowner anymore. People do.

That said, when I was sitting on the patio, semi-admiring my work and mostly comforting a stressed-out dog who really wanted to be in my lap, I also did some good observing of the way the sunlight passes through my backyard neighbor’s bamboo. It’s seriously beautiful. Something about the way the light gets broken and the bamboo sways makes it alive. The light that is, not the bamboo, which is, of course, obviously alive. It’s magical. I tried to take a picture, but I’m a lousy photographer. I couldn’t capture it at all. Well, or maybe my iPhone was not the best camera for the job.

I did take a picture of Zelda, though, to commemorate the occasion.

Zelda, taking a nap on her dog bed

What occasion, you ask? Well, we’ve owned that dog bed for years, and she never, ever uses it. It’s where Bartleby curled up the day he wandered into my backyard, but neither of them spend time there. I decided to throw it away, since it’s got a hole in it (presumably put there by the now-unhappy mouse that was living behind the now-gone granite countertops that had been sitting on the patio since my kitchen remodel.) I intended to drag it out to the curb for the trash guys, but got distracted by the bamboo, and what do I see when I turn around?

Zelda.

Perhaps expressing her opinion of all this chaos.

When I started this blog post I had something specific I was going to write about and it wasn’t Grace and it wasn’t Zelda and I have no idea what it was. Maybe fear? I’ve been thinking a lot about fear lately, good fear and bad fear, and optimism and faith. Fear is an emotion that people want to dismiss quickly, one way or another. Either it’s, “oh, you’ll be fine, you’ve got nothing to be afraid of” or it’s, “then don’t do the thing that scares you.” I feel like neither of those is the right answer.

I think some fear keeps me alert but also lets me know that I’m doing something exciting. A little good fear — not anxiety, but fear — keeps me present and focused. On the other hand, anxiety is the bad fear. Anxiety is when the fear starts spiraling into worry and becomes irrational. I’m trying very hard to stay present in my life and not let the anxiety take over. It’s trying, some days more than others. But as long as I can see that, I think I can beat it.

That’s the optimism and faith speaking. Or maybe the character strength of hope? I’m often truly scared about the future that I’m heading toward. What if I get sick? What if the dogs get sick? How will I deal with X, Y, Z? But whenever I get too focused on those what-ifs, I take a step back, and look at the day I’m in. What can I do to make today better? And what can I do today to make my tomorrows better? The answers to those questions are so much easier than the answers to the what-ifs. Right now, the answer is “stop writing a blog post and write Grace instead!” So off I go.

What can you do to make your today better?

Mindfulness exercise

I totally stumbled across this article — I was reading another one about dogs not liking hugs, which turned out to be sort of silly and obvious and this one was a link on the side — but I like it so much that I need to save it, and what better place than my blog?

Basically, it suggests an incredibly simple mindfulness exercise: for fifteen seconds, notice your breathing, in and out. And then ask yourself, which of my character strengths am I going to bring to my next action?

The character strengths are categorized into Wisdom, Courage, Temperance, Transcendence, Humanity, and Justice and then broken down within those sections into deeper levels. Some of them will be easy for me to remember to use: perseverance, creativity, curiosity. I recognize and appreciate those strengths in myself. (From the Wisdom and Courage sections.) But appreciation of beauty and excellence; gratitude; and hope (Transcendence) are just as useful and necessary in my life.

And then the others — love, honesty, bravery, zest, judgement, love of learning, humility, perspective, kindness, humor, spirituality, forgiveness, prudence, self-regulation, fairness, leadership, teamwork, social intelligence (in no particular order) — well, I won’t remember to use them as often, but I hope having written this post will encourage me to turn to the idea of approaching life from a position of mindful inner strength when I need them. It’s fifteen seconds that could change my day.

In other news… my list of things to do seems to keep getting longer instead of shorter, but I think the items on it may be getting both easier and more nit-picky. A new one that I added today is that my painters missed an area in the front room. I’m not sure how I missed it on the run-through and part of me wants to just ignore it. But now that I’ve spotted it, I see it every time I walk through the room. So finding a little can of the same color paint and touching it up is now on my list. And re-grouting my bathtub looks so good that now I want to re-grout the other bathtub. I painted the interior of the French doors that lead to the patio and the inside of the laundry room door — they both look so nice that I’m considering painting the exterior doors. That kind of stuff. Maybe they’re delaying tactics? Or distractions to keep me from obsessing about the thing that I really need to do, aka finish writing Grace.

Speaking of which… yeah, I should be doing that right now. But I’ll breathe for fifteen seconds first and then bring a character strength with me. Or maybe two. It seems like a time for both perseverance and creativity!

Inspiration strikes

I’ve had a stuck day. Like my head is elsewhere and my body is moving around without it, no imagination, no ability to put a coherent word next to another coherent word. I suspect this might have something to do with the ibuprofen PM I took before going to bed last night. Well, not before going to bed — before going to sleep, after an hour or so of lying awake.

I’ve been eating more sugar than I should — fresh peaches, bananas, and these yummy gluten-free cookies. End result: joint inflammation. I would still totally eat more of those cookies if I hadn’t finished the box yesterday. But interestingly, I found it very easy to resist the peaches. Why is the unhealthy food so much more tempting? Anyway, sugar leads to joint pain, which led to an over-the-counter sleeping aid, which led to a very groggy day.

My progress on the current chapter I’m working on, in sum total, consists of: “Noah settled into Tassamara as seamlessly as if he’d lived there forever.”

Next line should be… something? Anything? It’s an area that I’ve had trouble with before, narrative something-or-other. Basically making time pass. The next interesting thing to happen is when Akira and Zane get back from their honeymoon, so basically I want to skip ahead to that, but you know, it requires something more than… huh.

I could just skip ahead.

I could leave a note to myself in the file, along the lines of (Write Something Here) and write the part that’s more interesting. And maybe when I come back I’ll know more about what happens in that time period or else I’ll have a better idea of how to skip ahead.

*sigh

This idea is ridiculously obvious, but I have spent four hours sitting in front of this damn computer waiting for inspiration to strike and getting nowhere. I really need to remember somehow that inspiration strikes more readily when the fingers are moving. But now I need to go write Akira and Zane getting home from their honeymoon, and that makes me feel surprisingly cheerful, given how much of a miserable grind this day has felt like.

Writing Akira is always fun, though. One of my closest friends told me that I am more like Sylvie than I am like Akira, which might be one of those times when someone else sees you better than you see yourself, but writing Akira is easy because she just does and says and feels whatever I would do/say/feel in the same situation. I enjoy writing characters that I don’t have much in common with, but when the going gets hard, it’s nice to write someone who flows by instinct. Fingers crossed that she will do so for me now, because I’d really, really like to get some words written today!

Appreciating misery

I am miserably allergic. The combination of paint and dust and spring pollen and an extremely careless dairy intake* has knocked me flat. I want nothing more than to crawl under the sheets and go back to sleep. Well, apparently I want to whine to my blog more, because that’s what I’m choosing to do, but mostly I want to sleep.

But the blog inspiration was because I was realizing how lucky I am. My reaction to feeling so allergic was the automatic stress of a decade ago: I can’t be sick, I have too much to do! And it is true that my to-do list is about eighteen items long at the moment, ranging from the enormous — finish writing this damn book — to the marginally less enormous — clean the porch, touch up the trim paint, call a plumber about the dripping faucet — to the reasonably minor — install a bathroom light, spread some mulch around the plants out front.

And then I remembered that with the exception of the book, no one else on the planet cares when I do all the other stuff on my to-do list. I could crawl under my covers and have a completely unproductive day and it would not matter to anyone. When I put it that way, it sounds kind of bleak, but I didn’t feel bleak about it when it occurred to me. Instead, I just felt really fortunate. How lucky I am to be able to be sick with impunity. Sure, it sort of sucks to feel so lousy, but it’s so nice that I can be sick and decide to go back to bed and have that not be a disaster. It almost makes me not want to go back to bed, just so I can appreciate how fortunate I am.

I also woke up this morning to an incredibly painful jaw. I think I was grinding my teeth in my sleep. This is not fortunate, but I know exactly what it was from. I’ve been waiting for some of the houses in my neighborhood to sell and for the sales to close and have known, comfortably, that despite all my preparation, I wouldn’t be putting my house on the market until that happened. Well, it’s happening. Two houses sold this week and one closed. One of the houses that sold had only been on the market for about two weeks. That’s… well, exciting. Good news, right? Also terrifying in its own way. If I wanted, I could finish up the “must be done” items to put the house on the market this weekend. Well, not the book — but the house-related must-be-dones. I keep telling myself that there’s no rush, to take my time, to relax, but I think selling a house is just not ever going to be a relaxing sort of proposition.

Yesterday, I bought wood stain and black spray paint and touched up the cabinets in my bathroom and the solar lights that line my walkway (respectively). That’s the kind of job that normally I would think I should do but never get around to. Two hours of work, maximum, and both the cabinets and the walkway look so much better. It makes me wish I’d done the cabinets about five years ago. I could have been living with them looking nice all this time. Ah, well. Lesson learned, maybe.

Meanwhile, today I think I will be taking it easy. Some words on Grace, so I don’t break my current chain and maybe a couple of the phone calls I need to make, but otherwise, I think I’ll be wallowing in the freedom to be miserably allergic. Happily miserable allergic, if that’s not a total oxymoron!

*The dairy intake was both really stupid and sort of totally worth it. I was in my car, passing a Starbucks, thought how nice a coffee would be, and then got inspired in the drive-through lane to try their carmelized honey frappucino. It was perfect. Absolutely deliciously sweet and cold and everything I wanted. And I was probably a third of the way through when I thought, duh, the reason this tastes so good is because it’s real milk, you idiot! So yummy, though. If you handed me one right now, I would absolutely drink it even knowing the price.

Steps on a path

The painters are here. For the past seven years, there’ve been two patches of different purple paint on my bedroom wall. By the end of today or maybe the end of tomorrow, the walls will instead be a subtle grey neutral shade. I actually think the color is really appealing and I hope it’s going to look good with all my floors because the whole house will be that color, bedrooms, bathrooms, living room, kitchen, all of it.

I’m not sure how I feel about that. It’s strange to be making the house so nice so that I can (eventually) hand the keys over to someone else. The last few days I’ve basically been cleaning everything that I can, taking down the pictures on the wall, stacking up the books in boxes in the garage or piles in my closet.

I should take a picture of my closet because the piles… well, I started putting just a few books in there. The ones that might be essential, the ones that maybe I couldn’t get rid of.

Some cookbooks. The Zuni Cafe cookbook that taught me so much, the Smitten Kitchen cookbook that my aunt gave me, the Perfect Recipe cookbook that I use every Thanksgiving.

And then the books that had just a little too much meaning. Not the ones that had so much too much meaning that there was no way I was getting rid of them — that tiny collection made it into my mom’s cedar chest. When I am 80 years old and living in an assisted living facility, I’ll be using a magnifying glass to read the copy of Winnie the Pooh that my parents gave me for my fourth birthday or the copy of The White Dragon that was an unexpected gift in sixth grade.

But the others.

The Hunger Games trilogy, because when the third book came out, it was delivered, of course, on the day of release. R came home from school to find me reading it. Every twenty minutes for the next two hours he came into my room and said, “Aren’t you done yet?” until finally, exasperated, I said, “Do you need me to go to Barnes & Noble and buy another copy so that you can start reading it now?” He said yes. He said Yes! My dyslexic boy, who I was told might never learn to read, would certainly never enjoy reading, couldn’t wait two hours longer to get his hands on Mockingjay. Do I need to keep the whole trilogy for that? Probably not. But the sight of the books spurs the memory and the memory brings me joy.

Some Dianna Wynne Jones books. I’ve owned them since I was young. They were some of the first books I bought for myself. I’ve carted them from place to place for decades, keeping them even when letting go of so many others. The complete works of Lois McMaster Bujold. Comfort food when I’m sick. The Mystic and Rider series by Sharon Shinn, I couldn’t say how many times I’ve reread them. A couple books by Ellen Emerson White that are, on the surface, light entertainment, but on a deeper level, are stories of psychological survival in the face of trauma.

These are not books that are going to fit in an RV.

So maybe I stick them in a box and let them live in my brother’s basement for a while, waiting for the day that I decide to give myself a new home base. Or maybe I give them to friends, trying to find them new homes with people who might love them. Or maybe I donate them to the library, letting chance and fate decide whether some stranger will discover something that delights them or whether they wind up in a landfill. Maybe, maybe…

It was just about a month ago that I decided to embark on this adventure. I remind myself regularly, almost daily, that I can change my mind. This is my decision, my choice. If it’s too hard, I don’t have to do it. But underneath all the fear and all the angst about things, objects, stuff, a drumbeat of excitement steadily thumps away. I have no idea what the future is going to bring me, but letting go of the past is the first step on the path to finding out. Someday, sooner rather than later, I’m going to eat a lobster in Maine, go grocery shopping in South Dakota, admire the Grand Canyon with my own eyes, watch the sun rise over a beach while I walk the dogs before settling down to write… and suddenly those piles of books don’t seem so big after all.

On the other hand, I do need to be able to afford gas to do all those things, which probably means I should go back to writing the words that might someday earn me my lunch money. Onward!