WiP Report: Life Happens, Part 2

Living My Life

Today I was going to write and post a really long, extensive follow-up to last week’s whine-session subtitled “Feeding the Cats” about my bout of illness, injury and insomnia. But frankly this week I don’t have the time because, for one thing, yesterday I made a proposal to Border Crimes, the local chapter of Sisters in Crime, started by notable writer Nancy Pickard, of how we might go forward in the future.

That’s part of the point of this WiP. Life happens. Things come up. I care about what happens to our chapter of Sisters in Crime, and I don’t want it on my conscience that it suffered because I didn’t pay enough attention to it at a critical time.

In the past I haven’t always done that. One of my deepest regrets is not attending the funeral of a friend two or three years ago because I was embroiled in working on a book and trying to get it done. I don’t remember which book exactly, but I still feel guilt and regret for not properly saying goodbye to dear Barbara J.

So here’s the bottom line. I have lots of projects I could do. I always have. And so I have to choose. When I first began the Calendar Mystery series shortly after I retired in 2004, I thought I’d whip out all twelve books, one for each month of the year, and publish one a year. At that rate, I would have finished them in 2016. It’s now 2019, and I’ve only reached April and that only slightly, in a short story called “The Shackleton Ghost,” that appears at the end of Old Time Stories available now in print and as an eBook exclusively from Amazon. Since it’s impossible for me to write, edit, produce, publish, and properly promote a novel in ten weeks and get it out by the end of April this year, I’m setting the Calendar Mysteries aside at least for now. Maybe next year . . .

This year, I want to reboot an older series I’ve already published and return to a project I first completed thirty years ago. (Yikes!) Meanwhile, I hope to do things like going to my exercise class at noon today and to this evening’s book club meeting. (We’re talking about Kate Griffin’s Kitty Peck and the Music Hall Murders and I’m looking forward to hearing what my friends say about it.) Maybe once my Physical Therapist is through working on my sore right arm and left hip, I can resume my art classes. There are always day-to-day chores like buying for, preparing, eating and cleaning up after meals, occasional chores like cleaning the home office which I finally did yesterday, and everyday pleasures like walking around the neighborhood on a beautiful afternoon.

Also I’d like to be there to help an ailing neighbor or a group in need. I want to go to a friend’s funeral even if that means setting aside my writing or not posting on Facebook or my website regularly. In other words, live my life. For after all, life happens – until it doesn’t.