Home life has changed a lot. I know we talk about discipline in our writing and the need to show up at the page and put our butts in the chair, but we also need the wisdom to know that sometimes that just ain’t going to happen. This year has been one of those years.

My mother-in-law was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s two years ago, though I suspect she’d been suffering from the disease for some time before. A year ago, a situation arose where she was moved into her home and my husband had to take more responsibility for her medical care. As you might imagine, dealing with that and the attendant family dynamics caused a fair amount of stress. Then, shortly after the first of the year, she began to take a distinct downturn as the disease took its toll. By Mother’s Day, we seriously doubted she recognized any of us. In June, she began having difficulty swallowing. In July, she nearly choked because of that difficulty.

A month later, she was diagnosed with pneumonia, which is one of the leading causes of death in Alzheimer’s sufferers. Her husband of over fifty years made the difficult decision not to ask for heroic measures, and she was gone several days later. Her memorial was held a week and a half ago, the church filled with her friends and family.

So now we try to get back to the business of living, picking up pieces that were put on hold when things began to get bad, even if we didn’t realize they were on hold at the time. For the first time in months, the writing is actually coming easily for me, aided in no small part by my iPad (whose praises I shall sing in another post), and while many of the goals I made at the beginning of the year just aren’t going to happen, I can feel progress happening again. So, as the leaves begin to turn and summer slips into autumn, we begin again.

1) I cannot resist the lure of new yarn, especially since I’ve discovered lace knitting. I now need more storage space.

2) The shiny new project? Not so shiny. I started working through my “whys” and discovered a great big pothole that probably would have derailed me about seventy-five pages in. Not insurmountable, but it’s a bit on the back burner until I get a chance to figure things out — which won’t be for a while.

3) My other contemporary romantic comedy is moving forward finally, and the characters are starting to “speak” to me. This is a good sign.

4) The historical I’ve been editing very much wants to become a romantic comedy. There’s a problem; the way it’s originally plotted, we know that two of the characters we’ve seen on stage throughout the book (not the hero or heroine or the secondary leads) are going to be executed at the end. One doesn’t worry me so much, but the other came out as a tragic figure beginning to end, a bit mentally unbalanced and subject to the demons inside him and the political agenda of those around him (including his mother). Not the way to end a book that I’m hoping the reader will have been laughing through. That means I need to make some major changes.

That book was written several years ago, and it was only recently that I picked up the hard copy and decided to give it another look. I was trying to be “dark” and “edgy.” One thing I’ve learned since then; I ain’t dark and edgy. I can give you an intense situation. I can torture my characters with the best of ‘em and send them crawling over broken glass — but they’re going to do it with a laugh. Not jokes, but humor born out of people and their reaction to the situation around them. Ever see the show Coupling? Written by Steve Moffat (yes, the same one who’s currently writing Doctor Who), it’s a comedy about the relationship of men and women as they do the mating dance. The show is both funny and painful, but there aren’t the usual sitcom jokes. Instead, it’s how the characters react to one another. For example, Sally asks Patrick (whom she doesn’t want to admit she fancies because a) he’ll sleep with any beautiful woman that comes along and b) he’s a Tory) what he calls people he goes out with but doesn’t try to sleep with. In all innocence, not being condescending or snide, Patrick replies, “Men.”

I’ve met guys like that and you probably have too. It’s not all men or even a majority, but it’s funny because we know there is truth in the words and it’s true to his character. That’s the type of characters I like writing and that’s not conducive to a story ending in a rebellion and executions. So, the story is going to have to shift a few years previously which will allow me to keep pretty much all of my characters and while things aren’t going to end well for some folk, it’s a setback, not a final end.

I love writing, right? Just asking because at moments like this, I need reminding.

1) Gym again. More run/walk.

2) Having proudly stated that I don’t want to let the one sentence story summary hold me back, I need to open a blank file and start on the “whys?” for at least one of these projects.

The idea is brilliant; you boil your story down to its essential elements and communicate that to the listener, who will hopefully be intrigued enough to ask for a full/buy the book. It is absolutely something a writer needs to do as they send their precious work out into the cold, cruel world. My argument isn’t with that. My argument is about when the writer needs to do that.

I get the idea behind writing that one sentence; it’d be great if I could sit down and define my story before I actually started writing it. Problem is, my mind doesn’t work that way. Last year, I wrote a short story (which is being released in an upcoming anthology) and my mind did provide a single sentence: “Miss Amelia P. Crisswell — Investigations with Discretion.” Told me everything I needed to know: this was a single woman in the Victorian age investigating the strange and weird. The sentence is what is on her card.

By the time I finished the story, her name was still Amelia, but she wasn’t investigating anything. In fact, she was actually in hiding from something. The sentence is still valid because it got me moving, but I’m glad I didn’t spend too much time considering it deeply or trying to carefully craft it. The more time I spent on it, the more difficult it would have been to move away from that initial idea when it started to veer wildly off course. For me, concentrating deeply on summing up my story in twenty-five words stops me from writing because until I start bashing away on the keyboard, I don’t know what this story is.

I’m a fan of the writer Russell T Davies, and in his book, The Writer’s Tale, he talks at one point about being reluctant to start writing because while everything lives in his head, there are infinite possibilities. It’s when he starts making choices — turn left instead of turn right — that whole chunks of those possibilities are cut off, that the path the story takes is defined by the decisions we make as writers. Sometimes, the reluctance to cut off those choices freezes him into procrastination. That’s why I think I’ll save my one sentence until I get further along in the process; I want some of those ideas to keep on living for a little while longer as I get to know them. Besides, if I don’t have the one sentence to craft and worry over, then I’ve just removed another excuse as to why I’m not actually writing the story.

This, of course, is what works for me. Some folks may share my feelings; other may live and die by that one sentence. That’s part of this whole journey, that it is individual for each of us — and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

1) Do half an hour at the gym after work. Five minute warm up, 20 minutes of running sixty seconds alternating with walking 90 seconds, five minute cool down.

2) Work on one sentence description of new project I’m starting.

It sounds sooooo easy.