Next Project

Whew! It’s been far too long since I’ve posted. Good friends and former neighbors, Bill and Carol Metz emailed that they thought I’d left the country! Alas, I could tick off a half dozen reasons for being away so long but I’ll save the reasons to use as subjects for future blogs.

Before I go any further, I need to sincerely thank Susie Trial for “bailing me out” with her insightful message about her search for coping skills. Susie is a wonderful writer who inspires me with her selflessness and humor. I should mention here, too, that the photo of the doe lounging in Wild Verbena above Susie’s post was taken at her Brushy Creek home at Medina Lake.

As I draw myself up this bright Monday morning for an hour or two of writing, I find my mind is open, watchful for a sign, a new direction. I’ve just about completed a long and involved editing job and am thinking ahead, trying to decide on the next “big” project. I may end up re-writing an old fiction piece I finished a couple of years ago. Then, too, my mother had given me a huge storage box of her poetry that I’ve long thought should be compiled into a kind of memoir, a text of messages to future generations of women. Some of Mother's poetry has been published; the rest is neatly bound in folders she put together in the mid 1970s.

For me the decision for a new project usually begins by fishing through, discarding or filing news clippings, notes jotted from various television programs, books or magazine articles that I’ve saved for days like this - - wide open, without deadlines, appointments or to-the-minute schedules. Like the photo above showing a far away horizon and all that empty land to wander through unhurried.

Whatever I end up queuing to work on, I’m glad for this time to scrape out my skull, dust my internal file folder drawers in order to fill it all up again with something new. Something that’ll fire my interest and hopefully that of my readers.