Sitting Still, Standing Up, Braving Through

A lot more people in the world have desk jobs than ever before in history. Once upon a time, you might have had to convince people about how back-breaking and even debilitating working at a desk can be.

In a way I'm really lucky. I stand all day at my day job, so when I come home to write, I'm ready to sit down for a good, long while. But even that gets hard. Because I'm either standing for a long time, or sitting for a long time, my body wears out quick even though I get to switch between the two. I try to get up a lot and walk around to break up my writing, but I want to get a lot of writing done, and so I always sit longer than I mean to ....

Anyway, it made my mini-adventure yesterday a lot more fun than it otherwise would have been. I came home to a lost dog shut into the upstairs bathroom. Luckily, she had a collar with all her information on it. Calling did no good. Power was out up the road. So the girl and I walked her home. The place was all shut up with, get this, an electric gate blocking the way. No way to buzz the house to let us in. So I had the girl hold my flashlight and umbrella, hefted the dog into my arms, and lowered her over the gate safely to the other side. She dropped maybe the last six inches was all.

Pouring down rain, warm wind, transformers sparking and arching red and gold, the trees swaying and creaking and cracking, fir needles and pine cones littering the road, no lights except the flashlights that flickered and grew steadily dimmer, the flash of lights on a truck as an emergency power crew waited for the go-ahead to work on the line, my shoes squelching and squishing with so much water it felt like I was wading along a river shore ....

Awesome.

So often, writing feels like living in a cell. Sometimes, even if it's uncomfortable, its so good to get outside I never want to come back in.

Sometimes, especially because it was uncomfortable, and a little scary, and so real, I want to do it again.

Instead I sit down, and do my work. At least until the next time the weather and the world summon me.

Words and Rain

The rains have come.

I've been working on a particular book cover for a while now. It's making me crazy and stretching me to the limits of my abilities. It seems like every time I start to work on it, I run into a problem that I'm not sure how best to solve, and I end up watching a bunch of You Tube videos on Photoshop to figure out how to fix it.

The deck is all shiny. The rain-cleansed wind is pushing, pulling, making me want to explore. Beneath the trees next to our house, the air is full of the scents of ripe grapes, clean, musky mulch, and wet hay.

I've been copyediting too. I start to get involved in what I'm reading and I have to stop, go back, and look hard at each individual word. It's really hard to copy edit, and I'm not as good at it as I want to be. I know I'm missing things. I just have to keep going over and over and hope the stuff I do miss, everyone else will miss too as the story transports them into other worlds.

I've missed the clouds. Later I'm sure they'll feel gloomy and heavy, but right now they remind me of silver jewelry, campfire smoke, early mist on a mysterious lake, of winter days spent curled up around hot apple cider or hot chocolate.

The rains have come, and like the wanderlust the weather brings with it a drive to write. But I can't write yet, except for a few stolen minutes during breaks and lunches at work. I have this cover to finish, and copyediting to do. I have tomorrow off. I hope it rains. I want to get up early and write, and hike in the rain sheltered under an umbrella that the wind uses to play tug-of-war with me, and write some more, write until I can hardly keep my eyes open.