Tag #writer

Insecure Writers Support Group July Post

aimeredleaf, The Narrative Gardener Leave a comment

The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. Post your thoughts on your own blog. Talk about your doubts and the fears you have conquered. Discuss your struggles and triumphs. Offer a word of encouragement for others who are struggling. Visit others in the group and connect with your fellow writer – aim for a dozen new people each time – and return comments. This group is all about connecting!

Let’s rock the neurotic writing world!

Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG.

July’s question is: What would make you quit writing?

I can answer this in one word:

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay 

TIME.

Writing has become part of the package of the life I’ve built, but it isn’t what sustains or supports me. It is something I want to do and that I have recently found satisfaction in.

I’ve always known I needed a creative outlet, but it was an aspect that I ignored or boxed up to be let out ‘later’. I was far too busy for writing, I didn’t feel I had anything to write, and I preferred to read in my free time.

I also had landscape designing as my creative outlet. A few birds with one stone there, so to speak.

Since garden design is at a minimum now, I have searched for other ways to be creative. I can’t draw, I’m not musically inclined in the slightest, and poetry is ok, but I’m not often inspired in that manner.

Once I decided to write my own novel and stories, it has all come down to TIME.

It is a huge challenge to get in words when I can, in between gardening, living with three active dogs, house stuff, farm activities, and last but not least, starting and managing an editing business. So far, I get them in when I can, and I’m happy with that.

What tends to happen is if I get ‘into story’ then I stay there until that piece is written and let other things lag, like my blog.

Because I can only do so much.

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay 

I’m putting my faith in the tortoise of the proverb, content that ‘slow and steady’ will get the book, story, alternate world written. When the muse whips me along, I go with it as much as I can.

Writing is the thing that I can put aside and pick up later, and it uses more energy than reading, so it takes some preparation during the day. Time is certainly the deciding factor.

If I write, it’s because I have the muse and the time. If I don’t write, it’s because I don’t have the time.

And now that I’ve started, if I stop, it will most certainly be a matter of something else requiring that time.~

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay 

The Farmhouse

aimeredleaf, The Narrative Gardener Leave a comment

Another of my writing group pieces, this one came from the prompt of:

Write a story that takes place in the same place but at two very different time periods.

Enjoy!

the location of note

One of the underlying threads of my decision to live in my hometown again was that my dad and I would renovate the downstairs apartment in the farmhouse so I could live there.

I had two pretty noisy, active dogs and I knew there was no way I would be able to find an apartment with them, and I didn’t have the money to buy a house. It was an idea we had kicked around for some years at that point, and my decision to leave my then-situation cemented it.

I’d come home and stay with my brother until the apartment was done.

We had been demolishing this particular room for days, it felt like, and every wall we opened up revealed more problems. The list was continually growing longer, and my patience shorter. At times telling myself that it would all be worth it in the end worked, and other times it didn’t.

Today was one of the latter days. It was blasted hot, I was in as little clothing as possible when working with nasty musty horsehair plaster and lath, old cellulose blown-in insulation, and mouse infested fiberglass batting—or what was left of it. I was dusty, dirty, and cross. But I refused to stop. I wanted it done, the clock was ticking.

We had already discovered two layers of flooring, and because I decided to rip out the built-in cabinets to make room for more bathroom closet space on the other side of the wall, the upper layer had to be torn up. I wanted this room done right, it would be my office/study/reading room because of the big windows and the morning sun.

Actually, it is the room I’m in now, and in fact the exact spot I’m in now.

After all the cutting, wrenching, prying, and levering, the chunks of plywood began to come up, revealing an entire hardwood floor of two-inch planks, worn smooth by the passage of countless feet. My frustration instantly morphed into curiosity—how old was this house, really?

My dad didn’t seem to know, just that it had always been here, and the previous owner had added on several times, even in his lifetime, with his help.

The floor had vestiges of greenish-gray-blue paint, typical of older farmhouses, and dips where it was worn thin from travel. Then under the windows, we uncovered several holes, possibly those of pipes, but not necessarily.

By the time we finished clearing the room back to the studs and lower floor level, it became clear that we had uncovered the first kitchen in the house.

As it stands now, the kitchen is in front of me, through two walls. But to see the arrangement of cabinet marks and holes, it made complete sense that this room would have been the kitchen. Even if the barn that is out my window now wasn’t there, there would have been a barn of some sort, and the kitchen would have been located at the back of the house to look out on it for keeping track of family members, and catching the rising sun because it faces east.

The pictures that formed in my mind drew on images from Little House on the Prairie, but that wasn’t really right. At the time of this kitchen, the whole hill would have belonged to this farm, from the apple orchard and the Thayer Estate on one side to Sterling Road on the other. This house most likely would have had all the amenities of the time.

Though I don’t know much of the history of the property before my father’s time, I have often thought about this house and who sat here in this kitchen taking meals, or preparing them.

How many people were in the family, did they have servants, (can you tell I have been reading a lot of historical fiction?), and most importantly, how did they deal with all the rocks in the land that we have thousands of dollars of equipment to deal with now?

Were they successful?

I tend to think so. It was a large property and traces of it are still visible on the land; there must have been enough impetus to continue. It’s difficult to see any of the age of this house now, with the modern improvements we worked so hard on for two years, but knowing that the bones of it stretch back to a time past is only more fodder for my imagination some days.~

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