Back to the World

Time to post for the first time in April. The year's scheduled events are ticking by and now the only one left before summer is The Book. The book looms, and I am sorry to say but I am a bit lost in the weeds. The cause for my flailing may be the travel and production schedule I've been subject to since February, but whatever it is, it's got to stop. TODAY. Writing output has been negligible--as exemplified by the lack of blogging. Instead, I just keep adding to the outline and organization in non-organizational and non-helpful ways.

There has, however, been one bright spot in my obsessive-compulsive ditzing around the book: I found Scrivener. It is helping me make sense of the tangle into which I have twisted my outline and topic ambitions. Today I finish the organization and Set In Stone. It's time to rise up, shake off the excess, the anxieties and the what-about-this-tools that are clinging to my skin (think golden retriever after a romp in the kiddie pool) and focus on what I already know and can do. In fact I think I remember how I did that for the first book: Every time I see some cool new tool or technique I have to say to myself, "Wow. That's neat. I need to make a note of it for Book 3." Of course there won't BE a Book 3 (though I think I said that about Book 2 at this point in the process on Book 1) but that's besides the point. I just need a way to Let Things Go.

The travel we just finished was a week in Arizona for a family wedding. First, Tucson for a couple of days (the wedding), then to Phoenix to stay with my favorite uncle for a few days. He has a front yard full of Gamble's quail, doves and a cottontail bunny (Jessie is all about the animal pics and she took all the pictures in this post). While there, we went to the Desert Botanical Gardens and J went nuts for the butterflies, lizards, roadrunner, grounds squirrels, and hummingbirds--oh yes, and the cacti too. Finally we had two days up north with a train ride to the Grand Canyon and a three-mile hike along the rim.

Now we're home, I'm charging the bluetooth headset to start dictating the book to Dragon tomorrow, and everything spins up again.