Writing Pains, Back Porch Volunteers and Poor Persons' Pizza

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”—Cicero

“A world without music is like a world without oxygen.”—Andre Tanneberger

“A week without blogging is, like, a week when I made serious progress on my other writing project!”—Grace Waters

Only so much creative energy to go around, you know? I’ve been concentrating on my other writing project, a book that may or may not ever be published but that keeps begging to be written. I have no idea what I’m doing, but I’m writing. As I wrote to my friend Leena on Facebook the other day: “The book-writing thing is totally: ‘How do you eat an elephant?’ ya know?” She replied: “One bite at a time. Sometimes you gotta choke it down. Other times I think, ‘I can’t do this. It’s too…big, maddening, frustrating, and for WHAT?!’ For the challenge of doing it and the joy of laying the words on the page. Even if it’s nothing more than that, there is value in the process.”

I’m trying to stay away from book-writing advice in general. I’m in “Just Do It” mode. But if I get stuck, I’ll explore the bounty of books about writing books. I have heard the average novel is 75,000 words long. Which means I’m about (oh, man—a math problem…where is Will when I need him?) 7 percent done! (Man, oh, man. I’m gonna need a BIG blogging break. Maybe I can rope Will into telling a few A-Town tales.) However, if I go by NaNoWriMo standards, it’s only 50,000 words, in which case my book is (darnit, where’d that computer calculator thingy go?) precisely 11 percent complete! Still not very far along, but I’ve got the rest of my life, right? (Or, if I NaNoWriMo, 53 days—better get typin’!)

In the meantime, a couple of A-Town tidbits:

Behold, Our Back Porch (above). It’s the plant we’ve all been watching these past few weeks. This is what I believe gardeners call a “volunteer”—something we didn’t intend to grow there that sprouted up on its own. I suspect it is a cucumber plant, but only because I thought I spied one in a neighbor’s yard that was actually bearing “fruit.” However, clearly what I really need on this scene is a volunteer to paint my porch!

Poor Man’s Pizza (or perhaps more appropriately: Poor Persons’ Pizza, since there are several of us and we are not all adult males). We recently discovered the benefits of ordering bread sticks with cheese from Uncle S’s Pizzeria in A-Town. For about half the price of a regular “pie,” you can get, essentially, the same ingredients, packaged better for little people (smaller portions and less sauce = less waste and less mess). Che bello!