Updates! I Got Updates!

It’s been a while since I put pen to paper [put fingers to keys] here. That’s due to a few reasons, some of which I won’t get into, but some of which I will. I owe that to my subscribers, and I also owe them more content. So maybe this will help in a small way. And really, as for right now, I’m glad to sit here pounding the QWERTYUIOP in the air conditioning. I ran around the county a good bit today, hopping in and out of my little black econobox, and as I told Amy, it was so hot that nearly every part of my camisole was sticking to my voluptuous curves.

(For the humor-challenged folks out there, substitute “camisole” with “last year’s church marriage retreat t-shirt,” and exchange “voluptuous curves” with “dad bod that is quickly flying south.”)

It would be nice if a thunderstorm would kick up and cool things off, but we’re due some of those in the next few days. And some folks in this state and others have had more than their share of that kind of thing, so God be with them. And that’s the weather report for this afternoon. Now, let’s go to Norm with sports.

Again, I’m just kidding. First off, though, the story about Amber in the lifeboat is not dead. In fact, as I shifted from first through fifth today in the midst of the black interior and inadequate air conditioning (but it works!), I got several ideas. I’m still bandying things about in my old bald head that deal with how things are going to go in the story.

I might decide, as I did with my book after some excellent counsel from my middle school AG teacher, Mrs. Lin Venhuizen, to go ahead and write the ending first to make things easier. After some doubt and reluctance, in that instance my writer’s block got so severe that I started to entertain the possibility of doing what she suggested. (I’m not proud and set in my ways at all, am I?) Not long before Christmas that year, I was getting ready to take a shower and was in the midst of putting out the manger scene on the table in the foyer when it suddenly struck me to go ahead and write the ending.

The very manger scene mentioned above, with a detail shot focusing on the healed (glued) fissure on a ceramic shepherd boy’s neck. Toffee, our dearly departed cat, viciously decapitated him years ago on the brick hearth of the house we lived in at the time, having made sport of him with her paws.

While I was in the shower, the ending came to me in a rush. I got out, threw some clothes on, grabbed a laptop, and wrote the epilogue to that story, 1058 words, in less than 20 minutes. I really would like to go back and do some post-publishing editing to the whole book and publish it again. That’s partly because I rushed to get it out and therefore missed a few mistakes, and it’s partly because my publisher at the time had some editors that apparently made strange grammar decisions. In the aforesaid rush, I let some changes stand that shouldn’t have been made.

I also feel like I’m a better writer now than I was then. But that epilogue stands almost word-for-word as it came to me in the shower that day, and needs no editing, really, that I can see.

With the book, I of course had to give Mrs. Venhuizen credit where credit was due in the acknowledgements. She helped me when no one else could, when I needed to eventually write about something bad happening to a character I enjoyed creating, and was mentally fighting with actually writing about it. But when I got that ending, the middle was so much easier to write. It was amazing, really.

That’s water over the dam, however. We were talking about Amber and her ordeal on the Pacific, weren’t we? When we last left her, she was furiously digging the little paddle that came with her life raft into the dark blue water, trying with all her might to head toward something she saw on the horizon.

What I’ve got right now isn’t writer’s block, really. It truthfully just boils down to not being able to decide between a myriad of plot options. With Amber, I even had trouble deciding on the color of her shirt. That’s explainable, though: my daughter has a pale yellow, scoop-neck shirt, and I wanted to change Amber’s top so it’d be different from hers. I flirted with making it pink. But in the end I decided it didn’t matter, because Amber is not my daughter. And I could see that yellow shirt in my mind very well, so I left it.

But we’ll join Amber again soon. As I said, I owe that to my subscribers, especially the dear ones who have said they’re enjoying it and want more.

And I know how I want this to end; it’s just the middle that I’m puzzling over. It might make sense to go ahead and write the ending someplace.

It might be evident if I did, simply because you’ll see middle entries all come out in a rush. But hey, they might come out in a rush anyway. Sometimes, that’s how it goes.

Whoever you are, I hope this attempt at an explanation finds you happy and healthy. And I pray God blesses you in a mighty, evident way. He’s good.