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Can you believe that summer is half over already? Here in the San Joaquin Valley, we’ve been lucky not to have the whole month sizzling at 100 degree plus temps, but in a couple of days it’s supposed to hit 108° … fun fun! What’s worse, we just returned from visiting family in Tacoma, Washington, where we had to wear a light jacket in the mornings and evenings. It was our first visit to that beautiful green state, but I hope to return many times.

Pictured is the Snoqualmie Falls, which was one of the destinations on our Twin Peaks loving son’s birthday trip.

I’ve been in the land of the lost …

For seven months, I’ve been in hiding. I didn’t plan to drop out. I had planned that after all the business of publishing Open & Honest (Sometimes) was finished, I would get right back to work on my serious women’s fiction novel that I’d started writing five years earlier, but every time I opened the Scrivener file, I would reread passages, look at my scene notes, stare out the window, and finally close the file, not having added any new words.

I was not writing. It was frustrating, and I didn’t know what to do about it. My connections with other writers have dwindled over the years. In fact, I have only one regular writing “buddy” left, and she has so little time for her own writing that I refuse to take up too much of her time with my writing woes. We talked about my block a few times, but what could she do? I simply could not settle my mind to write.

So, I returned to a previous creative outlet. I started beading. Bead weaving was a new venture, where I learned to stitch thousands of tiny beads into various designs. I stitched for four months straight. I amassed a passel of pretty bracelets, gifted some, and then stitched some earrings too.

Still, my heart ached to write. As time passed, I began to fear that I would never write again. And then, scariest of all, I started to feel that I might be all right with that.

I read a lot of books during those months. Most of them were good. Some of them were very good. And that made me envious. And that envy made me angry that I couldn’t write. As I stitched and read, I listened for The Muse. I begged The Muse to speak. I ordered The Muse to give me a story idea.

Considering that my best-selling books are my romantic comedies, I decided I should try writing a romance. I had two completed romance short stories, so I looked at those first to see if they were candidates to be expanded. Neither seemed likely. I went back to beading.

Finally, I remembered an opening scene I’d written in 2015 for another planned women’s fiction novel. I reread that scene. It sparked my imagination. And suddenly, I was writing again.

However, I soon realized that I wanted to write this story as a contemporary romance. But the more dialogue I wrote, the more I realized that my heroine has a sarcastic mouth. And her thoughts are often amusing. And sometimes her actions are impulsive and … well … comedic. So, it looks like this is going to be another romantic comedy, or at least a romance with humor. Brigid is not the screwball that Chelsea is, but I’m betting you’ll laugh a time or two when you read my next novel.