I’m still living in panic-strewn chaos. I’m not saying that’s bad, I’m just saying it’s not the ideal. I should couch that by making it clear nothing is essentially wrong. Just the usual changes and growing—and I’m sooo not good at all that change stuff. (I know I’m not alone in this, ye Facebook users who have fought thy way through the many FB improvements in time past.)
I look around me every once in a while and take stock of my many blessings: people I love in my life, the stuff they like to do, the stuff I like to do, the stuff we acquire to do all that stuff, and the other stuff I use to clean and organize all that stuff that has to be stored somewhere—often in my bedroom, where I scare myself silly at two in the morning because I wake up to something tumbling and forget about the ladder with a suit that needs fixing hanging on it and go into paroxysms of fear at the seemingly tall figure standing next to my bed.
Serious tangential run-on, there.
But it gets me to my point, I think, which is: My writing habits are getting really, really strange with all this craziness. For one, I am writing story ideas and details on envelopes. Not just any envelopes, but Christmas card envelopes. I’m using the Christmas greeting cards to write thoughts from my morning Bible study, so I have all these sparkling, white envelopes—because, I’ll confess, I have boxes of Christmas cards I’ve collected over the years with the notion that I’m actually going to send out Christmas cards to people I haven’t seen in forever. You know, so they can say, “Hey, did you know Rilla is still moving and breathing on the planet? It’s true; I have the Christmas card to prove it.” Well, after four-ish years of Facebooking “Merry Christmas,” I don’t see the point in this festive rite of the season; and now I have all these blank cards and envelopes, see?
It also needs to be stated that I’m writing on these envelopes in my closet. Yes, I’m holed up in my closet, where I keep a pen and a bottle of water… and a box of crackers. I think I could live rather cheerily in my closet for a bit. Just yesterday I moved my laptop in there—which, I think, is really progress because I might stop writing on envelopes and use the laptop instead.
So, how is this new routine working for me? Surprisingly well, except I completely quit working on the sequel to Dragonfly Prince. It’s marinating in my brain, but I haven’t been able to touch it in weeks because Dragonfly Prince has undergone a transformation. The last chapters have been replaced with totally new scenes and a totally new ending. I don’t know who did that. Alright, it had to be me; but what a presumptuous creature I am, despoiling my own story! Of course, the sequel gets the backlash and must reconfigure itself with a little help from me.
I’ve also gone back to one very wonderful tale that I let dangle while Dragonfly Prince Part Deux was getting the limelight. It’s a love story set in the Middle Ages. (I actually have three Middle Ages stories. I’m a medieval times junkie.)
There was another story I revisited that I think I should burn, but enough about that.
You may consider this my desperate attempt to update my blog, but I’d rather you didn’t. I’d rather you think to yourself, “Wow, what a great way to recycle all those annoying xmas cards!” Hey, it’s creative. Let’s just leave it at that.
Rilla Writer 