New From Then

Above is the header I’ve been trying to incorporate into the website for a week. Thursday someone will be helping me make that happen for real. Just a little preview before unveiling the new. She’s helping  me do a few other things, too. Also, I already forgot (again) how to wrap text and time is short today so just pretend I prefer this image this way. Eventually everything will work itself out. I’m confident. You need lots of that to be a writer.

I just finished a novella. The first scenes rely heavily on a short story I wrote many years ago about a trip I took many years before that. When I took the chapter to my critique group, I relied on them to let me know when anachronisms slipped in. Really, the entire trip was an anachronism, like saying “What a trip,” and not talking about vacation.

But I worked with what I had and then I asked a young friend to read and be ruthless. She worked her magic and finally I think I have a story from 1973 than works in 2014. That’s how it always works, at least for me. Writing relies on memory. Why else write but to capture those magic times when the world seemed new and full of possibilities?

Or at least that reason to write should be in the shopping cart along with love, sex, revenge, and death.

As I prepare to send my Sweet Melissa into the world, I’ll find out if I have succeeded in making over yesterday into something new. And it should arrive at just about the time the new header comes, too.