Lessons from Spring

Spring is my teacher. Each year, this brief season unfurls wild banners of fragile petal and new leaf that remind me I know nothing but surface secrets. The diadem or end beauty of every living thing is hidden in the bulb and root long before time shapes color into a blushing bud.

How many trees have I passed by, oblivious to the gem cloud that was always a part of their being, but unseen except for a transitory primaveral window?

For my irises, I mulch them before winter, I trim their leaves back, I remove the mulch in the spring and give them a thin layer of garden soil. I apply Miracle-Gro pellets for extra nourishment and water them every few days (Sometimes I weed, though not as much as I should!).

The end result? An instance of ephemeral, rainbow-robbing beauty.

Plants teach me humility and patience as a writer. The story must start in the deep and dirt, germinating out of the nourishing detritus of hard work and old dreams passed on. And like my irises, I hope to bear a bright coronet of ink one day.

Sneak peek into my next world

Welcome to the world of Snow White and Rose Red

Coming March 2019! 

I have failed

After breaking my arm in January and then reinjuring it in April, I haven't felt like writing very much. One-handed typing sucks (my brain has grown too dependent on a digital medium for my stories and paper and pen translates them into a black hole of incoherent scribbles)! But more than physical impediments, I must confess that my mind has been blanketed in a heavy depression.

Or maybe just slapped with a reality check on naive ambition.

Since I graduated from college, I have written five novels. Two are self-published and another will be coming out in September. Two will never see the light of day because they were practice novels. And then I have another four novels totaling about 500 pages of half-finished work. I had a marvelous agent for about six years, but my work just never quite cut it on the traditional publishing market and we parted ways last October.

My bone is broken. So is my will. I'm tired. I want to quit writing. I've tried again and again. But the stories won't leave me alone, and truthfully--I don't want them to go. My soul grows blank and paper-thin without them.

So I will keep trying to learn from my mistakes, to revise, to read, to soak in the world, to ink something bright and dark and dreaming.

Life . . . dares.