I admit it. I’m bad news as far as being an e-author goes. I write slow. Well, that’s not quite entirely true. I draft fast, but I revise and rewrite slow. I have to think about it, ponder themes and subtexts, and weed out all the extraneous stuff I like to write that fleshes out worldbuilding.  Much of this stuff comes intrinsically and I’ve been doing it subconsciously up to now.  But as I like to grow as a writer and not rest on my laurels (such as they are), I’ve been paying more attention to what I do unconsciously and finding ways that I can consciously improve it.

A few years ago, when I realized that writing was actually my capital-D Dream–that  it was the force driving me, keeping me going through life’s ups and downs, and one of the reasons I wake up in the morning (the others are six and almost-three and have breakfast demands), I realized that if it wasn’t going to remain an unrecognized, unfulfilled, someday kind of dream, that I’d need to work at it.  To take the natural instincts that I have and understand them well enough to make them grow and refine them into the best manifestation they can be.  I’d have to prune the bad habits and encourage the tender shoots and hardy blossoms until they bore fruit, and then manage the growth to keep the harvest coming.

I have been glutting myself with the fertilizer of writing courses, techniques, articles, and lectures, and after a germination period that felt so long getting through, I’m emerging again to put what I’ve learned to pixels again.  It’s a daunting task, once you understand just how little you know.  But like any big step, sometimes you just have to close your eyes and do it.

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Springtime Greetings to you and yours. May your chocolate bunnies not come to life and attempt to eat you before you bite their little heads off. May your peeps become appropriately and deliciously stale with a modest passage of time

I live in an area where the roads are relatively flat and wide, and the weather is considered overall to be “temperate.” What this means in a Darwinian sense is that our traffic patterns have not yet evolved the necessary characteristics to cope with conditions that provide challenges to the baseline genus and species of driver found in our locality.

Consequently, whenever two (unique and precious) snowflakes find themselves rubbing gently together, the friction from the quantum collision causes a ripple in the space-time continuum which causes the entire area to be blanketed in a fluffy white layer of pure panic.  The streets become clogged, the bottled water and toilet paper disappear from store shelves at speeds that defy everything we understand about physics.  Snowblowers mysteriously become fifty bucks more expensive, yet disappear the same way.  And inevitably, I will discover that in spite of my own defensive grocery stalking, I will have run out of something basic, like soup.

So even if you are a halfway decent driver in the snow (read: not from around here), your best bet is to stay indoors, or keep yourself in the cul-de-sac and do donuts all day, and for the love of Sister Mary Francis, stay the hell off the roads and out of the way of the trucks!  Me…I’m watching out the window as the white death from above falls down and the bluejays puff themselves up with affront because who the hell ordered this snow anyway, when it’s so close to spring.  And for once, I’m with the bluejays.