How can I write when everything else is given a higher priority. Fix this. Do that. It seems as soon as warm weather hits, writing takes a back seat. Waaaay back! The usual things that come with owning (along with the bank) a house take over, and by the time I finish with those, I am too tired to sit down to a keyboard and concentrate on the project at hand. Throw in the things that have to be done to promote your current work, and creativity time is gone. I need to figure a way to slough off some of the more mundane chores that keep bogging me down. No wonder my blogs have become less frequent. That is not an excuse, but it is a fact. Oh, well! Fall is only three months away.

Will the dream die with me?

Disillusionment has set in. What I believed was a real publisher was actually just a "come on" for one of those self publishing outfits. Whom can you trust? There are so many bogus entities floating around out there in cyberspace. It is difficult to separate the scams and the shams from the legitimate. I guess the old saw about things too good to be true is right. For now, it is back to square one. I believe in my book, "Double Trouble on Corned Beef Row," and I thought the "publisher" did, too. They played me like a Stradivarius. Now, my greatest fear is that I will die before it ever gets into print. It's a story about identical Jewish twins separated at birth and living dramatically different lives. It is the kind of story Barry Levinson would like because it involves a Baltimore landmark, Lombard Street's Corned Beef Row, a deli owner, and spies fighting over a secret weapon stolen from the Israelis. The way things look now, he will never know it exists.
At 71, diabetic, overweight, and arthritic, I am running out of time. It took me two years to finally get my book into what I believed to be really enjoyable reading. Were those years I could have put to better use? I loved/hated the process. Envisioning the story, I loved. All of the editing, and re-rewriting was a chore. Unfortunately, only the reading public will determine if it was a worthwhile endeavor. If that ever happens. Sometimes, life really sucks.

No Imagination?

My sister and I have a ritual we perform each week. We have a telephone conversation every Tuesday. She called today because she is going on a trip tomorrow. She told me about spending the weekend with her two youngest grandkids. She said after an exhausting day, they wanted her to read them a story at bedtime. The only problem with that is they want to look at pictures while she reads it. She wanted them to go to sleep. Her solution was to TELL them a story which she made up. She had them close their eyes and IMAGINE what she was saying. She started narrating, and one of the first characters in it was a unicorn. When she was ready to finish the story, Aidan, the youngest, said, "Grandmom, I see it!" "What do you see?" she asked. He answered,
"the unicorn." If kids nowadays have no imagination, we can only blame the grown ups who have robbed them of needing one with Xbox, Wii, and TV. Where are we going to get our next generation capable of creative thinking? Creating your own fun out of your imagination is part of growing up. At least it was for me.