I woke up at 4:30 this morning and just knew I wouldn't fall back to sleep. Not only was I not tired, I felt like I had to get up and work on my query letter for my book. So I was in my office with a mug of chai tea by 5:30 and worked until 7.
It was the most productive 90 minutes I've had in a long time.
Dwayne got up early, too, so I had a coffee break at 6:00 and told him, "This is what it's like to go into labour. There was no way I could stay in bed. I had to get up and work, and I've given birth to a great query."
Finally. In the past 18 months, I guess I've written two dozen versions of my query letter, trying to find the right way to describe my book. Finding my new focus (although not new; there all the time) fixed even that problem. I could even do a pitch in an elevator!
So now I'm thinking I'll have a new routine whenever I get to write books full-time. I'll get up at 5 to work until 7 then go for a walk then eat breakfast. If I've done two hours of good work first thing in the morning, I'll be able to enjoy the walk and breakfast without the pressure of getting to work.
Ah, the dream: No pressure to get to work.

For the past week and a half, I've been dealing with a case of shingles. What I thought was a short-sleeved blouse chafing a couple of "spots" on my upper right arm last Tuesday ended up being this huge 4 inch by 4 inch mess. By the time my husband insisted I head to the hospital (seeing as it takes 6 weeks to see my family physician), it was too late to stop the infection from bursting out. I'm taking the anti-viral meds but they're likely only stopping the shingles from spreading beyond my upper arm (there's a spot on just above the inside of my elbow that has created a less-awful mirror spot on the other side of the elbow bend but other than that, it's been contained to the upper arm).
So just as the temperatures start to fall, I have to wear T-shirts because -- don't read this if you have a weak stomach -- this stuff oozes. The bigger the patch, the more oozing. Disgusting. It's on the front of my upper arm so it's pretty obvious.
"What happened to your arm?" was a common question this week. It actually looked back then like a bad burn. It's not just the blisters that come up; there is also this vast redness that encircles each spot and my arm is puffed up. First thing on Monday morning, Jane was busy and Charlie was on the phone when someone came in with an In Memoriam for the paper; after helping the customer, I went back to my desk and said, "Perhaps Scabby Annie shouldn't be dealing with the public."
On Monday night, I slathered Vitamin E gel on it because some of it was starting to dry up but that appeared to make it worse; yesterday, I slapped some aloe vera on those two lesser spots and cripes! dried them right up but sucked blood up too so the scab looks worse than it is. While I'm glad I didn't try it on the big patch, I'm amazed at how quickly the aloe vera dried the patch up; didn't "heal" it, per se, because the redness around it is still there.
Shingles really is awful. I'm lucky; I'm not experiencing any pain that often goes along with it. I get twinges in the deeper blisters (two of those) but nothing that needs painkillers. I've just used allergy medication for the itching and swelling.
Here's the thing: when this first broke out, I thought it looked like the cold sore I get on my nose. When I finally got around to Googling "shingles" (which is all I think the ER doctor did), it mentioned the danger of a shingles outbreak on the forehead or nose because it could spread to the eyes. I'm thinking I've been getting SHINGLES on my nose all these years. No wonder it was so bad. The website also mentioned the cream, Zovirax, for treating shingles. Well, I have a whole tube of that thanks to my cold sores so I slathered that on it yesterday and by jingo, that seems to be drying it up faster than anything (except the aloe vera but that instant moisture-sucking aspect is a little scary - what if I used it on my nose?!?)
My conclusion about this is that the anti-viral meds are fine (same stuff I was prescribed for cold sores) but the topical cream should have been prescribed as well. And I wonder what role aloe vera could play? So how do I get this knowledge back to the medical community? Not seeing my MD for treatment means there is no follow-up; am I getting better? what is working and what is not working? I'm going to have to write one of my newspaper columns about this.
I am going to make an appointment to see my doctor because I would like to explore this connection with my nose further so I need to see a specialist for that.
I'll be glad when I can start wearing long sleeves over the spot, though. I'm wearing a zippered fleece sweater so that I can keep fairly warm while having my right arm out. Works for the most part although the arm is cold all the time, and I peed on the unused sleeve last night because I forgot it was hanging down behind me when I sat on the toilet.

It's Abby's birthday today.
She is one.
One! Already.

If you missed the whole point of yesterday's spur-of-the-moment, lying-on-the-bed post, this is it:
I watched my husband come into the bedroom, take off his socks, put on a clean pair, then go searching for his slippers. They were on the mat on my side of the bed (which is next to the sliding door to the west deck) so on his way to the slippers, he used his socks to "mop" the muddy paw prints left by Abby in the middle of the night.
Well, at least he's a good cook.

So I have discovered that the whole point and purpose of a tablet or smart phone is social media. That's why you only get a space big enough for writing a couple of lines.
Not ideal for a writer like me who takes four or five lines just to warm up.
I keep thinking about setting up a FB or Twitter account under my official writing name but without a book to promote, and with the freelance writing career on sabbitical, I don't see any point. I watch the commercials for these tablets and see all the things it's possible to do with them but now I see that it's all App and WiFi related; there are no internal programs like Word or Photoshop that you can work with off-line.
Maybe there's some new, still-obscure social media site I can join for practice. I hear China is launching one...

I'm typing this on my new tablet which is not really designed for a lot of typing, and honestly, you might as well have given me a spaceship to operate because I have no idea how use all the stuff4 that's associate with this and now Ican't even see the text I'm typing
But that's not the reson Iam writing at thistime.
I want to tell you that I just discovered myhusband's secret to cleaning the floors: put on a clean pair of socks then drag them over the muddy footprints on the bedroom floor.

(tomorrow at work at a real computer, I will fix my typos.)
(note to sister: now Iknow how Mum feels when she is typing emails.)

There was something interesting I was going to write about today, thought of it last night, but I didn't write it down so you get this instead:

Here's our pumpkin patch with a few squash mixed in. Everything has ripened up early this year. I'll be able to line the stairs with pumpkins for a Thanksgiving decoration but they might not make it until the end of the month. By then, they'll look like zombie pumpkins!

Had a very productive weekend that was, somehow, relaxing at the same time. I read, wrote, painted, went to the cafe twice, even watched a movie. But by the end of Sunday, I realized I hadn't done anything active or physical at all. Every time I started up the lane with the dogs, it started raining. Didn't move a single rock or dig a single hole either. Now that we're heading into October -- already! -- I'll have to start thinking about cleaning up the gardens, finishing rock walls for new gardens -- more! -- and planting bulbs. All relaxing in a completely different way.

I kind of feel like this pumpkin (orange, plump, productive) just without the bird shit.

I like surprises. Even the kind when someone is standing behind me and I don't know they're there when I turned around and it scares the beejeezus out of me.
But the best kind of surprises, besides a fabulous 40th birthday party, is finding a new pair of boots sitting by the door when I get home from work. (My husband is so knee-jerk generous, his idea of retail therapy is to buy something for his wife.)
Not just any boots, mind you. Bog boots, this country girl's preferred footwear year around.
And not just any Bog boots but...

RED BOOTS!
This is my signature footwear. Officially. As of this moment. From now on, I'm wearing nothing but red shoes. Watch my feet when I'm on TV doing interviews during my book tour. I'll be wearing red boots (but not Bogs; those I'll save for the Better Homes and Gardens profile).
There is no freakin' way I'm not going to get published now. The secret is great footwear, I know it.

Not an a-ha moment but an aaaaaaah moment.
It's my day off.
It's raining.
I have the house to myself for a little while.
Only 15 chapters left to edit.
Pitter patter.

 

The perk that makes up for not making a lot of money at this job that I love is the personal printing I get to do. Business cards, inspirational posters, invitations.
And most importantly, book covers that I tape to the wall above my computer to act as visual aids and motivation. If you see it, it will happen.

(I can't come up with anything to write that is worthy of this photo.)

Sarah,
normally I would email this to you but since you don't have email at the moment, I can share this with my small world of readers...and all struggling creators of whatever whenever. Oh, and my home-schooling sister who has her kids create the most fabulous artwork.
From the "Shelf Awareness" e-newsletter I receive twice a week (and if you love books, you need to subscribe):

"Peter H. Reynolds kicks off the third annual Dot Day with Mayor Thomas Menino at the Boston Children's Museum. Fittingly, the celebration began with a teacher, Terry Shay of Waterloo, Iowa, and his students on September 15, 2009. It was Vashti's teacher in The Dot who set the budding artist on her path with the suggestion, "Just make a mark and see where it takes you."
Reynolds believes, like his heroine Marisol in Sky Color, that each of us has a powerful innate impulse to create. He admits that sometimes while sipping a cup of tea he's so inspired that rather than get water, he's used his tea as his watercolor base. That contributes to the sepia tones in what he calls his "creatrilogy": The Dot, Ish and Sky Color (all published by Candlewick)."


Amazing!
How will you celebrate Dot Day?

The most amazing thing happened since realizing the true point of my book. It released all of my creative energy. Released as in, liberated. Released as in, from a trap or a dark hole or those unreachable recesses of my lumpy, twisted brain.
As in...
...I'm painting.
And I'm not painting crap.
No, really, I'm not. I'm painting abstract and flowers as I gain confidence and technique. I don't have much technique, actually, but I've gleaned enough from Norene's workshops to create some decent paintings. Finally, I understand under-AND over-painting, although I haven't yet tried the over-painting, which is why I work on three or four canvasses at once; that allows me to try different things, slowly, while working on the big canvas, very slowly (so afraid to screw up!), which will be a sunflower.
What's most amazing, and this I attribute to the release of true, pure creative energy, is that I seem to know what I'm doing and nothing is frustrating me. If I could figure out what this is, and bottle it, I'd be a millionaire. All I know is that I love it and will tap into it as often as I can to keep it flowing.
The paint space isn't in my office, either; it's in the new garage. When the urge to paint came over me a few weekends ago, after finishing my latest reading and editing of my manuscript, I just felt the need for space. Outside was too windy so I set up one of the long tables we use for yard sales and parties, and voila! Large, bright studio with a radio for good music to paint by.
This also means I can do it whenever I want, even for half an hour. I'm one of those LUCKY people who have their own personal chefs. Mum and Dwayne make supper while I paint in the garage. If I ever create a company, the word "lucky" is going to have to be in the title (fortunate being too long, blessed sounding too religious).  
I'm photographing each stage of each canvas but not ready to share those yet. Well, maybe just this one, because it's little.

In searching for a font (fonts are my secret passion now!), I came across the following quote, author unknown:

"It's not happy people who are thankful; it's thankful people who are happy."

"A Revolutionary Idea to Care for People with Alzheimer's and Dementia"

Check it out.

Dwayne is learning my family's way of coping with stress: You laugh.
To that end, the new daily question in this house is, "How's your bird?"

There is no way to nutshell what happened here in July. Because it began in 1978 when Dwayne married a woman who has made his life miserable ever since. You can imagine how full-blown her Narcissistic Personality Disorder has become more than 30 years later. It's been ten years since she left with her latest lover after not ever being faithful to Dwayne and yet she can't move on, can't let him go.
Add two children who are now grown and easily brain-washed by a woman described by a lawyer as "smooth but an ice cube wouldn't melt in her mouth."
Add a new marriage to a younger, prettier and smarter woman plus an article that exposed one of her biggest lies (although it doesn't top the perennial favourite, that Dwayne beat her throughout their marriage). 
Add a renovation to a house plus endless attempts to ruin our happy times (my surprise birthday party, our weekend at the AJAs, the anniversary party).
Add a 30-year-old daughter who wasn't leaving here until she had goaded her father into smacking her.
Add a counter charge of assault when it turns out she struck first plus a days-long Facebook spree that declared her father a liar, bully and woman beater. 
Add one letter from a lawyer to the ex-wife telling her to stay away from Dwayne, his wife and his mother-in-law plus letters to each of his two children.
And it all equals one pissed off woman who is furious that the man she has always manipulated and controlled through his devotion to his children now has the upper hand.
He is no longer that man.
I am the outside observer to all this. For five years, I watched his daughter grow increasingly rude and bitchy, taking more and more from her father but giving only abuse in return. She treats him the way she watched her mother treat him; she's knows no other way of treating men. I have said nothing because I vowed never to make Dwayne choose between his kids and me but it's not been easy. Even his son turned out to be a loser, borrowing money from his grandfather that has yet to be repaid and selling land his grandfather gave him but not telling anyone he did so. After his son stopped talking to him 18 months ago because Dwayne demanded he come clean to his grandfather, Dwayne remained determined he wasn't going to lose his daughter, too.
But as things escalated, what he stood to lose was far greater than two children who caused him nothing but grief and sleepless nights.
So a few weeks ago, after the anniversary party that the ex-wife did not stop or even ruin, I suggested Dwayne get a tattoo to remind him of what is important to him, some symbol of what he has now and where his life is going.

Dwayne spent three hours yesterday afternoon getting one of our osprey tattooed on his arm, where he can see it always. And it is one of our birds; it's the photo from the magazine article that was nominated for an AJA. Dwayne put that nesting pole up early in his first marriage but it wasn't until he and I were married that the osprey came. There is no better symbol to him of the positive direction his life is going now than that bird.
Let me tell you -- it's weird to see such a big tattoo on my husband! It will lighten a bit as the blood drains away and the white pops out more. I love that it has such meaning for us.
"Every time you think of doing something that could jeopardize what we've gained as a couple and the integrity you've shown through this whole ordeal, look at your arm," I told him.
It's hard to change.I compare breaking free of that ex-wife and thirty years of emotional abuse to quitting smoking: it's a very hard habit to break when so many things push your buttons -- and when those things know the buttons to push. I'm very proud of my husband for taking on the challenge of becoming the man he's meant to be. And for spending three hours getting pricked by a needle.

Do you know what I just did?
DO YOU KNOW WHAT I JUST DID???
I emailed an agent to ask her to delete the query and sample pages that I sent two weeks ago in order that I may email her my new and improved query.
Do you know how unorthodox, how possibly wrong that could be? How many rules I broke?
And do you know...
...I don't give a shit.
You don't get anywhere in life without breaking some rules. It matters so much to me that I finally discovered what makes my book truly unique out there in that market where the best selling books right now are a fiction trilogy about bondage that it is worth the possibility of pissing off an agent so much that she may not only delete my original query but tell me to screw off forever.
Except that even when breaking rules, I remain polite and professional. I don't flatter, I don't beg. I figured she'd understand that when inspiration hits a writer, you can't control the timing.
What do I have to lose? I just finished editing my book again (Is anyone keeping track of what draft this is? It might be 12) and made so many improvements, including removing an entire chapter -- painfully, it was about Diana but it breaks up the flow and has lost its relevancy in this scaled-down version -- that I'm not just hopeful about this book again, I'm excited.I'm excited at finding something unique, something that adds to the information out there about this growing epidemic. I'm excited that even if this agent isn't interested in my book no matter what query I send, I had the guts to email her anyway.
Now, if you will excuse me, I'm going to throw up.

Ha!
There is nothing worse than a reformed whatever -- smoker, drinker, wheat-eater, reprobate -- and there is nothing better than when a reformer finally converts someone.
Like my husband.
I don't know how many people I've told about the trick to fix a bad back, if the problem is a slipped disc, or even over-stretched muscles. It's principle of the Mckenzie method: your back has a natural curve in it and it's not the curve forward. If a back is to stay healthy, it must arch. The simplest way to achieve relief from back pain is to lie on your stomach with your arms down at your sides and relax for 2 to 3 minutes. That's it; just relax. But it has to be a relaxation; those muscles must release tension and ease. And this is done every two hours.
So last week, my husband hurt his back while splitting wood out back. It was a bad one and I recognized the way he was walking: slipped disc. As always when he complains about a sore back, I tell him to lie on his stomach. As always, he refuses.
Until I finally said on Saturday night: "Since my back surgery three years ago, have I relapsed?"
That seemed to be the argument that got through to him because on Sunday morning, he asked me, rather sheepishly, "So I lie on my stomach, right? What do I do with my arms?"
Breakthrough!
It's such a simple thing to do - lie down and relax for two minutes - but it's amazing the resistance I get from people who complain of back pain. As if people like to be crippled and miserable.
"Oh, it hurts to lie on my stomach," one woman who I know has bulging discs told me immediately. It hurt Dwayne to get down on the floor but once he was there, he was fine. Every two hours, there he was, lying on a yoga mat in the living room, and by Monday, he was in the tractor tilling up a new pumpkin patch -- and coming inside every so often to lie on his stomach.
Three years ago, I fixed bulging discs with this technique (the herniated disc was too bad to be fully corrected this way, I think - but maybe I was hurting it doing physio) and I continue to use it when I recognize symptoms of strain in my back. While waiting for surgery, I promised my back I would never hurt it again and I intend on keeping that promise. That means the McKenzie Method (Google it) and lots of yoga back bends.
Believe me.

A month ago, Dwayne's father, who is 86, fell off a chair and cracked his hip. It doesn't require surgery but it pains him a lot and makes getting around difficult. He can't do stairs nor can he drive. So this means we haven't been able to have Donn and Mary here for supper. I got the bright idea, then, that for the last long weekend of summer, before the kids head back to school, we'd surprise them with a family BBQ.
We told them that we'd bring supper down on Sunday evening, that we'd be there around 4 o'clock. Then we told everyone else to arrive at the same time with a salad of some kind. So Donn and Mary were surprised and we ate chips and drank pop and BBQ'd hamburgers and hot dogs and ate potato salad and baked beans and coleslaw and broccoli salad then had ice cream cones for dessert.
The kids played washer toss, the adults played washer toss. Abby was there, running around, being remarkably good. The sun stayed out, the seagulls circled overhead, Mary wasn't mad even though she doesn't like surprises and Donn was kept grinning like a rat eatin' rhubarb.
And through it all, there wasn't a phone to be seen.
My mother pointed this out to me this morning. Because I don't have a smart phone, I only notice them when they are present. To me, the absence of phones doesn't register. Yet I would have noticed the girls playing washer toss while clutching a phone in one hand; I would have noticed M. keeping her head down as she texted; I would have noticed someone wandering off, talking into a phone pressed to his ear.
It is possible to interact with the world, even as small a world as our little family BBQ, without a phone in use. This is not an anti-phone rant (in fact, I'm getting a tablet in order to read magazines because I'm tired of the piles cluttering my living room) because I think smart phones are smart. But I think they also waste a lot of time and energy and focus. We're living a lot less now that more of our life is caught up in these phones.
We had four generations gathered together again last night. We do it a lot but you never know when that will change. It was far better for those four kids to play washer toss with each other and with their fathers and uncles than it was to sit for hours playing with silly apps.