Still Here...Tending My Garden

I haven't blogged this week, and there's a perfectly good reason why.

I had nothing to say.

Sometimes that's the only reason, and it's a good one. Why take up bandwidth just to hear yourself chatter on, after all?

You see, there's three cycles to writing, kind of like gardening.

There's the gathering cycle, where I read widely and gather tools and ideas.

There's the planting cycle, where you put the idea into the earth - maybe two or more ideas together - and then you watch what grows from it.

Then there's the harvesting cycle, where you pluck and share, if there's anything worth sharing

Some ideas die.

Some ideas grow into something that's cute and entertaining, like the story I did that's about to be published here in October.

Some ideas grow into a Jack-in-the-beanstock vine that take you, the house, and the entire neighborhood with it, like this one.

And there there's others that are somewhere in-between...still waiting for their turn for the light.

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Right now, I'm in a sort of gathering phase, where I've turned my house inside-out, and now I'm facing a stuffed closet with so many papers in it that used to mean something, but they've sat in that closet so long that I can't actually remember what they meant, and they're falling on me.

Not to mention emails back from 2007 with missing stories captured within, and two large duffel bags and several smaller bags that nearly broke my whole family's backs getting them from my mother's house in Maryland to mine in Texas, with stories from lives connected to mine swirling inside, waiting to get out and get converted into some kind of digital format I can actually work with...

So you see...nothing really to say.

Gathering...