Hello out there! It’s been awhile. I’ve been on a holiday writing hiatus, mostly to finish up my 50 nights in the wilderness goal for 2014. Glad to say that I accomplished that goal..my last night was on 12/30 with three friends in Big Bend National Park. We spent three days backpacking and three nights car camping (did not count for my goal since it was reached by car). So the grand total is 50 nights reached by human power and 54 nights in a tent total…which is almost two months!
Back to writing though. I am getting ready to dive back into the YA climate change novel–how’s that for an interesting description? Hmm…although it has been hard to commit back to it after a day of work writing government documents. Too much sitting…but my writing group is meeting on January 12 and I must have something to read.
Have I mentioned my writing group? It’s composed of five of us, deliberately small so that we have quality time to read. We are all working on very diverse projects, mostly memoir though some outliers. It’s fascinating since all of the others are very talented–no need to cringe after someone reads. Two of the others have books published, and I am confident the other two will soon.
It can be a chore to resurface. Sometimes I want to stay in the underwater dream of hiking all day, not working, just drifting seamlessly through the days without responsibilities. I know people who make a life of this, though I am not sure how they do it..trust fund perhaps? It’s an impossible dream, though, and so I do what I can, diving in for small adventures. Hiking lends itself well to writing, since after awhile I have exhausted all thoughts (“Would you rather be stranded in an elevator with Justin Beiber or Paris Hilton?”; going through the alphabet to make up new nail polish color names) and instead thinking of scraps of text, dialogue, characters..I always come back wanting to write.
And so it goes, another January, a vague feeling of sadness for a year that is over, but thinking ahead to possibilities for the future. Back to it, guys! What are you working on?