The Beach in December

Ever since college, my favorite part of winter is when I visit my grandparents in New Hampshire. Usually this happens around Christmas, and my parents and brother and various aunts and uncles visit too.

But my favorite favorite part of winter is when we all go to the beach.

The beach in December is beautiful. Snow on the sand, and ice amongst the rocks. The water is bluer than the Hope Diamond, and the wet sheen as the tide rolls out is like glass.

New Englanders obviously have an affinity for doing summery things in the winter (see our fondness for ice cream all year round) because it's never lonely walking on the shore a few days after Christmas. Especially on an afternoon like the one on which I took this pictures.

I just wanted to share this feeling with the world.

So far...

I swear, I am the worst at keeping resolutions. Just the worst. I keep telling myself to blog as much as I write, and it just never happens. Ugh.

Here are my goals for 2014 - because isn't that pretty much everyone's first blog post of a new year?

1 - Finish the first draft of Grave of the Goddess and start working on the second.

2 - Find a job. Yeah, I was laid off from my job the same day we closed on our house in late July. Yeah, I'm still unemployed. Yeah, it's a problem.

3 - Walk more. As Michael Moore and many many others say...

4 - Revive my science blog. More on this to come.

That's all for now. Because I'm trying to be practical, and not set myself up for failure. And also because these are all things that I'd be trying to do anyway - it's just nice to set them down in words with a reasonable expectation of being held to their standards.

New year! Yippee!

Resuming Course

I was doing well with the posting for awhile. What happened?

My typical sinking-back-into-bad-habits happened. I'm pretty sick of resolving to do things and failing to follow through. You think that would be enough to motivate me to, you know, STOP FAILING. But it doesn't. Sigh.

At any rate, here I am now, more than a month since my last post.

Feel like I've finally settled into my job. Nice feeling. Though I still worry about working for what is, essentially, a paper company. Nobody buys paper anymore; it's definitely a dying industry. All I have to do is look around Holyoke to see what kind of destruction dying industries wreak on people's lives. (Let alone my experiences in Worcester.) But I've adopted a wait and see approach to this job. I'm trying to give it a few months to really get a feel of whether this is going to be successful for me long-term or not.

LESS THAN A MONTH FROM CLOSING ON THE HOUSE. Yes, that deserved the caps-lock frenzy.

Oh! And I get to see my parents and also Dylan's new niece (I think of her as nearly-my-niece) next week. That's incredibly exciting for the following reasons:

1. I haven't been home in a stupid long time. 
2. I love babies.  Especially other people's babies.  
3. The Fourth of July is the best holiday ever and the only part of summer I really look forward to. (I know, I'm weird.)

So there's all of that. Oh right. And I decided last minute to attempt to write 50,000 words of a chick lit/mainstream novel that I have only the bare bones of a plot for in the 31 days of July. While I vacation and move and all that. Yaaay...

Yup.

Fear of Writing the First Line

First writing prompt from A Year of Writing Dangerously by Barbara Abercrombie:

"What is your metaphor for fear of writing that first line?"

I go back to the world with my lighthouse for this and probably all other metaphors that concern my writing.

Fear of writing the first line means I am stuck in the forest. I can't see that it must end - that if I just keep walking I will emerge on the banks of the road that leads down to the rocky beach and my lighthouse where everyone waits for me. Although in reality I enjoy feeling lost within a forest's borders, able to immerse myself in nature, in my worlds of words that feeling turns into a muffling sense of panic. The trees around me lace close together and block out daylight. They silence the whisper of wind and water. It takes all of my fortitude to drag my baffled gaze down from their branches and look ahead. There are gaps between the trunks of those trees, and if I just keep walking eventually the sunlight will filter down to dapple the forest floor at my feet.

Most of the time when I am stuck in the forest, all I do is sit on a rock and stare into the tangle of dark tree limbs. I cannot break my staring until a bird flits through my field of vision (sudden inspiration), or - best of all - my fox appears to show me the path out again (muse brings me back to a good writing state of mind).

I spent two years working in the woods and loved it (most of the time). But getting stuck in their midst does seem the most apt metaphor I can think of for when I cannot even get one line of writing down.

Today.