It is both my enemy and my hope for the future, my child and my lord, my demon and my savior, my constant companion and the thing which robs me of companionship.

It is peopled with my friends, my creative offspring, and I am so tired of their chatter that I want to both abandon them beside the road and carry them pinned all over my shirt like Girl Scout badges, tote them around like five pound bags of sugar wrapped in receiving blankets as if they were sex ed projects for a…

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The REAL reason for not going to the gathering of all of you loverly writers here is that this $75/day (when there is work) cowboy/starving artist can't afford it, has no rich uncle, and truly will be there in spirit only unless I accidentally trip on basket of gold doubloons in the next few weeks, but as I lay awake at night, imagining the rich uncle and his generosity, I also realize several other reasons why I simply CANNOT attend this weekend of writing and…

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Follow up to Scented and Scrubbed :

I still have the first dress I ever wore, framed, under glass, along with the letter my Granny wrote to me when I was one week old, six weeks premature, explaining that she made it over a doll's pattern, and perhaps could I grow a little before she made the next one?

When I was ten my mom bought some aqua and white gingham and made me a sun dress…

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I am learning to live here where the storms come up from the gulf rather than down from the north, headed for the other gulf, and today I watched a hummingbird feeding in a snow storm.

If I were to pick a symbol of you and me, would I pick a hummer's sword, or a bat's dive, or a lizard's elbow, or a fox's wet nose, or a perfect point of obsidian, or the rain's round promise?

The bear's paw earrings sometimes scratch you in the night, but I don't take them out.

The  lady…

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The problem, I think, lies in the fact that a woman is rarely told that her natural body smells good, with no potions or soap to cover up the real scent that lingers between her folds,

that her hair is gorgeous freshly washed or freshly released from a hat after a long day's work,

that her fingernails are just as beautiful with little rims of garden dirt under them as red-shellacked and tortured,

that her whiskey laugh

and her natural exuberance

and her morning… Continue

Which fault does not belong to me?

 

1.   I spend too much money on shoes, even those that are impractical and I have no use for, and they pile up in my closet gathering dust.

 

2.  I use my "mommy voice" with animals and sometimes with the man I love.  It is very irritating... at least to him, if not to my horses.

 

3.  I am an impatient perfectionist who would rather procrastinate than to dive off into a job I am not sure I can do…

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Who gave you the right, the right to cut into the mountain so your road will run more true?

What is true, exactly... true as in straight, from one point to the other or true as in bearing truth or true as in flat and boring and no longer going along the curves of the land, in tune with the rise and fall and heartbeat?

Who gave you the right to cut down the tree for something other than a simple shelter, a  fire on a cold night, to sear the outside of the meat  and consume the…

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I was a lopsided child, raising children, focused on some types of conversations, some kinds of information, letting the rest wash over me as a child who plays at the feet of the adults, in the room but incomprehending of the harder truths.

I wore t-shirts emblazoned with Pooh and his honey pot, so why should I be suprised now when I am fashion un-conscious, and I fed four people on $100/mo + free beef, so why am I surprised now when I don't know what couscsous or camarones or spring…

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So today I opened documents (pdf) from the marketing division of the press publishing my book and waded through a data base of people they want to send ARCs to and people to receive gratis copies of the actual book, and my heart thumped hard at entries like "New York Times Book Review," and "Kirkus," and "Dallas Morning News." 

I made small-voiced suggestions and drank the coffee (third cup) grown cold, and worked on my website to make it better, and opened the document holding my…

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I forced some hyacinth bulbs to bloom...forced them...they are blooming by force...enforced blooms...and their scent startles me at breakfast.

Cold wind is blowing and winter is not over and I write in my journal about how to move this manuscript along, how to fix its flaws, how to chink the cracks between the logs, keep the cold wind of scrutiny out.

What is missing in this new book I am writing is exactly the same thing that was missing in my life all the weeks I spent holed…

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So I did it... I wrote all the way to the end... the way I told you I would, the way I dreamed of doing as I scribbled on yellow legal pads and drank water when I wanted something stronger, as I dreamed about my characters when I wanted to be sleeping deeply.

 

I did it... I wrote a second novel, and got it printed at Kinkos ($22.82 for 266 pages), carried it around and re-read it, let  you read it, marked all over it with a red pencil.

 

I did…

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Whew! Just got home from a very long trip and found that my fellow sixers have been busy busy!  I finally scrolled down far enough to find the actual current challenge and decided to join in.  I refused to read more than a couple of entries before I wrote my own, so haven't commented on anyone's yet.  Anyway, Hi!  Glad to be back, and I am full of inspiration up to my eyeballs and am ready to write or ride.... whichever needs doing.  A

 

1.  I am stronger than…

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I had a BLT for breakfast in the same casino restaurant I've been eating in all week, and the T was very pale, a wintertime T, a hidden slice of T that watered down the B and the L, the small bowl of cottage cheese already turned toward bad.

Driving home through a snow storm, listening to the new Ian Tyson cd, 4 songs sung in his new raspy voice, we cry, with fatigue, with beauty, with re-entry blues, with love that we can't explain because it grows and changes and has a strong stem…

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