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"Hard is not hopeless." - General David Petraeus



Sunday, November 30, 2014

The Shower Curtain

Strange name for a blog post, but it's what's on my mind today.

Yep.  My shower curtain.

See, my shower curtain functions a lot differently than the way most people use theirs.  Oh sure, it's obviously hung in the shower to keep water from flooding my bathroom floor.  But that's where the resemblance of my shower curtain and the shower curtain of others ends.

See some shower curtains come with several pockets, ostensibly to store shower accessories like shampoo, a scrub brush, razor, etc.  But not my shower curtain.

Instead, I have the pockets facing outward, and each of them, about 10 in all, have not shower accessories, but one line blurbs for novels I anticipate writing.

For example:  "The decisions a military man makes between duty and the enemy."  That's the blurb for my novel Principle Engagement.

They are not written as one line pitches, per se, but as one line blurbs to remind me of all the story ideas rolling around in my head.  Some of those blurbs represent not one novel, but series of novels.

In all, I'd say my shower curtain represents ideas for about 10-15 novels.

I put these blurbs in my shower curtain to give me a daily reminder of all the potential novels I could write and get out there on e-book shelves.  Only problem is, life constantly interferes with my plans.

Due to circumstances beyond my control I have less time than ever, barely managing to sleep 4-5 hours each night, much less meeting the basics of survival.  In the meantime, those story concepts sit lonely and waiting in the shower curtain.  The original plan in placing them there, printed out on white paper, was to color them in a bright bold color, one by one, as each novel was finished.  Only one, Principle Engagement, has been colored in (and I want to re-write it).  The rest are still printed on lonely white squares as always.

So that leads me back to the age old battle.  There is a truth that cannot be escaped.

Writers write.

But I'm not writing.

I'm barely scraping through the daily fight for life as it is.  But then that leaves the question: Will I go through life, ending it, wondering what might have been if I had only put fingers to keyboard and completed all those awesome story ideas rolling around in my head?  Or will I somehow, in the midst of life's daily battle, find a way to produce these books and get them out there, taking my chances and seeing what opportunities they may hold?

I don't know the answer.  But I can tell you I've recently been fueled to think about my writing due to a reason most people would not suspect.  Anger.  But that is the subject of another post. 

In the meantime, since tomorrow is December 1st, the first day of the last month of the year, I am asking myself to squeak out 700 words per week (100 a day).  It's not much.  It won't get me very far.  But it still gets me farther than -0- words per day.

I have traditionally been someone who writes in fits and starts.  I doubt that M.O. will change.  But we'll see, if for just the last month of the year, if I can produce a small word count and begin bringing creativity back online from the nothingness that has been this year.