No activity on the kitchen remodel this week. You know how it is: they work, work, work, and you see progress, then suddenly one day they don’t show up for a week. And a good week it was to not be here. I would have felt awful watching them work in this heat. I know these guys well though and I’m sure they were working another job, so they were sweating on someone else’s dime. We are waiting for the plumber to show up, so there was a reason behind the slow down. I don’t even remember what week we are on now. Maybe it’s week 4, or maybe 6?
Since nothing happened to the big hole in the ground behind our house, I’ll tell you about MY week instead. I headed out to Palm Springs where it was 102 degrees on Saturday. Yep, I had my own sweatfest. I was in the AC, so no real sweatfest, but hotter than Ole Billie Hell as my grandfather used to say. I spoke for 2 hours to the Palm Springs Writers Guild about surviving the writing life.
How to Survive it, that is. I have a fun powerpoint I use when I give these talks, and I tell stories about my own ups and lots of downs in the writing journey. I talk about how rejection is a big part of being a writer. About making your manuscript the best it can be and that “good enough” means it’s not good enough. I also share resources for finding your way because I, by no means, got to this point in my journey on my own. Some of the resources I share are Judy Reeves’s books, especially A Writers Book of Days. One woman shouted out that she knew Judy too! I also told the workshoppers about Jill Badonsky’s great books on creativity. I shared my story about Ralph Keyes’s book The Courage to Write. Reading that book was when I decided I needed to quit reading How-to books and start writing.
The progress on the house makes me think of how writing works. That ebb and flow. Rush, rush, rush, then stop. But has it really stopped? Isn’t the dirt settling, the ideas are mulling, the plumber checks things out then comes back with all the right equipment. Writing isn’t all typing, hammering, and digging. It’s also thinking, experiencing, and reminscing. Type, type, type, then stop.
One last thing, I went to CVS yesterday to get my lastest Covid booster. I saw this great skeleton. Totally a Hazel skeleton.
