June 15, 2022
This is an unusual week for me,
because I am taking this week off from most of my regular routine. I’ve of
course written this weekly essay, but that is the total of the writing I had
planned to do over these seven days. I generally don’t write on Sundays, but it’s
really been a long time since I’ve stepped away from novel writing for more
than a day.
Little odds and ends that need
doing have been accumulating over the last several weeks. To be honest, I have
so many tasks on my to-do list that I have a very bad feeling that I won’t get
much done despite my plans to so. Sometimes I show an appalling lack of
self-discipline.
And maybe that’s not a bad
thing at all. Maybe I am allowed to take the better part of a week and just,
you know, watch some TV, read a little, play a few games. I enjoy acrostics,
and I have found one free site online that I like. In the interests of full
disclosure, and in case you don’t know, acrostics are crossword puzzles with a
twist. The top half of the page is a “crossword grid” and each square has a
letter and a number. Each crossword once completed reveals a quote from some author
or another. The bottom half of the page is comprised of several questions, or
clues each designated with a letter, and each of which require an answer. Each
letter of the answer has a number above it, which corresponds to the crossword
grid. And as you answer those questions, the letters are distributed into that
grid.
What I enjoy most is working
back and forth; I look at the grid and see a word, “s_ cce_ _” and figure the word is probably “success”;
then when I have filled in all the possible or probable words in the framework,
I go back down at the listed clues and see how many of those I can now get—because
as you fill in a word in the grid, those letters appear in their “clue word”.
I don’t spend a lot of time on
these puzzles, and I am quite slow at them. But I do enjoy the mental stimulation.
I’ve also spent some time
outside so far this week and plan to do so again, tomorrow, on an outing that
has been planned for a couple of weeks. The outing will occur rain or shine or,
as the weather forecast calls for, very hot.
I’ve just finished my 68th
novel for my publisher, Siren-Bookstrand. That’s more books than I’d ever
thought I would be able to write in my lifetime, let alone have published.
I had the thought recently that this fact could be a sign that there is justice
in the cosmos after all. I yearned to be an author from the time I was a teen. And
then, I married young. Some would say while not yet an adult. And in those early
married years, that dream of being an author never died. Life did get in the
way, as I note in my brief book-bios. It takes a lot of time and energy to be a
wife and a mom, and I worked outside the home for many of those years, as well.
I still wrote and quite devotedly, too. And that activity happened most usually,
and ironically, on Sundays.
Thinking about it now, perhaps
I was never meant to be a published author in my twenties or thirties to begin
with. Hell, when you think about it, a person doesn’t know much worth squat
when one is in their twenties or thirties. So maybe, all, so far, has unfolded
as it was meant to be.
I still enjoy writing, despite
that the entire process takes a lot longer now that it did just a few years ago.
That’s just a part of getting
older, and there is nothing anyone can do about that.
Love,
Morgan
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury
No comments:
Post a Comment