What to do with past insights

HUMMINGBIRD AT FEEDER

I AM WATCHING A HUMMINGBIRD ESCHEW THE FEEDER FOR FLOWERS

This is a photo so old that it’s my previous feeder! There is a birdie out there visiting the flowers (which have stopped blooming – I need to dead-head more of the bee balm) aggressively – and not stopping to cheat for a drink at the feeder I just replenished this morning. Smart bird! Go for the real stuff.

Not a very good picture – taken from my office window, and the birdies wiggle.

The hummingbird moving in my peripheral vision reminds me to stop, blink, breathe, and look further than two feet away at the monitor.

New feature (for me): bits from the past.

I’m starting a new feature with this post: Insights from my Notes.

I have several millions words worth of notes in notebooks and in my Scrivener writing files, and I occasionally read one – and promptly forget its insight again.

Since I seem dry lately on writing about writing – I’m actually in a place where I don’t want to change much of anything, but just to finish the Pride’s Children trilogy before I forget what the heck I’m doing, or go senile (always a possibility) – I haven’t had much to blog about except illness – and some of the insights of that process.

Illness? Three stents in my cardiac arteries

And I have reached such a place that my cardiologist won’t see me again until January – and didn’t even bring up the fact that I have stopped taking ALL the meds they recommended (on pain of immediate death by massive heart attack).

So the battle there is a stalemate. And I am keeping up the cardiac rehab in my basement – and trying to increase the amount of exercise by tiny amounts over the next few months.

And I am deliberately ignoring all chest pains that are not mule kicks, and all sharp pains that come and go, and anything that doesn’t grab me by the neck and insist I do something, because I am literally tired of living on the edge and overthinking this thing. If the big one comes along, and is silent, it will get me anyway.

I have bigger fish to fry.

Today’s insight comes from March 8, 2016 at 9:51 AM

We have a tradition in this country: Flannery O’Connor, Margaret Mitchell, even Harper Lee, of pouring time, love, and everything you have into the slow writing of a novel. This is what I want.

Some shameless self-promotion now goes with the territory.

So be it.

Putting endless time into something does NOT guarantee it will be good. Not putting time into something does not guarantee it won’t be good.
But with my life, this is what I know, this is what I can do.

I could still be ridiculous, off key, have delusions of grandeur that are not justified.
My ego could be massive with no reason.

But I think it is because I actually have something to say, and this – fiction – is the way I can say it.
Others do plenty of advocacy [for CFS] – and I am shamelessly letting them do the work FOR me, since that is not my charism.
Fiction is mine.

I think I have something good going, and I need to spend the time to finish it – without the fear that dogs my steps.

I bid you all a good day – and hummingbirds.