Writing into a black hole...

Hmmm...I guess it's okay to create another post on my own post. And since there are no comments, I reckon I'm writing into a black hole rather than from one.

The comments and post have loosened the writing muscles, and I want to keep exercising them. So I'll just have at it...if anyone comments, that's good.

Went to swim this afternoon, and reconnected with a casual friend who sometimes works the front desk at the gym. Her 74-year-old mother died a couple of weeks ago, and I didn't know because I've been out of town so much in the past 10 weeks, since my daughter was diagnosed with breast cancer. Talking with my friend about her mother made me realize how out-of-it I've been. Three gorgeous fall days have passed with me hardly leaving the house...not depression so much as a burst of a need to reorganize my office--maybe on the heels of having written a guest column in southernauthors.blogspot.com in which I talked a lot about my office. But the reorganizing also included our bedroom and living room, and after several days of hectic activity, I realized I was going through what I almost always do when there's been a crisis: try to straighten up what parts of my life I can, because I have no control over the enormous other things, eg, breast cancer. When I finally did go out this afternoon, I was hit with joy for the fall that is exploding all around me, in spite of the hideous drought and dire predictions of a colorless autumn.

Our cross-the-street neighbors have a sugar maple I can see from my kitchen window, and every October I'm surprised to see its glorious red-orange-yellow, having forgotten the starring roll it plays before it's naked for winter. I stood, stunned, beside my car, realizing how inwardly directed I've been in my flurry of moving furniture. Cleaning bookcases. Throwing away. Giving away. Borrowing my son's strong back to move the larger pieces. And occasionally returning to the keyboard.

There's a story roaming my brain and I'm not quite ready to commit it to e-paper, though now I'm convinced it begins in the fall, during a storm, in the full moon, hospital labor and delivery swamped (more from the storm than the moon). One of the mothers is a character from an earlier book.

I was about to write of character, plot, setting...then I realized I didn't want to do that for fear someone else would use my ideas...and here I am writing into a void. Funny! More later.