The Ice Is Beginning to Crack

Those people who live in northern climes will know what I mean about the ice going out. I'm not there yet, but you can hear the gunshot cracks and feel the tension building like electricity in the air.

Last week saw some major changes. One of those changes is that I felt emotions for a long time. Sure, it was anger, but it's a step. The big "D" for me isn't so much a grand malaise, or general downer, as it is an absence of emotion. Any emotion. What emotional feeling there is have shorter lives than anti-matter. So that I remained angry, not a "nothing to boiling point" anger, but a really pissed kind of anger, for most of a day is something. I've also had longer moment of joy and fun. Sure, that sardonic smile may have crossed my lips, but at least I would chuckle openly.

More importantly, I started writing again. Not much, but I did a whole notepad page of story for the book. The story bone for it came from work where I plated a card for someone whose first name was "Blue." No, seriously. So I had a little brain tickle that this was the name on a name tag of a waitress in a diner. So I started with that, and bingo the main character was Steve Goodlie and he was in the diner with the love interest (named Raquel for the moment). Steve was flirting with the waitress while trying to get Raquel to sign documents. It was while writing this out that I realized that this was the scene I was looking for, the scene where Steve realizes that he's falling in love with Raquel. That all these other things (money, other women, etc) aren't important any more. So here's the major scene of the second act (other than the conversation during the road trip, which sets us up with some plot coupons), and it just landed in my lap. Thank you, oh Muse.

This was the impetus to get off my lard butt and resubmit my stories and work on edits this weekend. So, while I'm not out of the woods yet, the momentum has changed to going back up.

This morning NE Ohio smelled of spring. Even with snow on the ground, there were the scents of new life. That both real and metaphor.