When I realized my deadline for writing this
post was looming, I dredged up what choices I thought I had. I’d just been in Wyoming for a month and wondered if I should share my photos with you all, but a number of them have already hit the pages of Facebook and Instagram so I nixed that. Then, of course, I had just
attended a conference in Tucson so considered words of wisdom emanating from
that experience, but so many of us have already talked about our conferences, I
also let that idea go. Next thought to enter my mind was that I’ve returned to the traumas of selling
an apartment—in NYC VERY traumatic waiting for Board approval on top of
everything else—and buying a house, but all that is better left in the recesses
of my mind.
And then I was reading a wonderful book, Irene Sandell’s River
of the Arms of God (highly recommended!) in which two women, one
hundred years apart, are imprisoned in different ways. Well, that got me
thinking! Prisons! As Sandell made me realize, not all prisons have bars. While
one of the women in her book is in something of a ‘gilded cage,’ it struck me that
her husband was as much imprisoned as she was, and at his own hand. He felt the
compulsion to behave in a certain way and maintain his inheritance in the same manner
his forebears had done, and there was no one else cracking the whip. How many
of us do something similar to ourselves?
A friend and I have been moaning the usual
array of rants against publishing and promoting the last few months. You know
the kind I mean if you’re an author or work in publishing. It’s the ‘gotta get that book out,’ gotta
meet that deadline, gotta get that blog written or that Facebook post out, put
something up on Pinterest or Instagram, show off my new cover, arrange that
book signing, 'like' my friend’s page, comment on that author’s post, announce
that five star review, and so on that we all have got ourselves into. In other
words, it’s pressure we put on ourselves.
And to be perfectly frank, I don’t think I can stop! I can let things go
for a while, but then when time permits, it’s a Murphy’s Law situation: if there is time to be filled, it will
certainly be filled (and probably something will go wrong as well!).
Behind this all is the love of writing, of
course. We want to create and get those
words down on the page, hell or high water. There is that ‘something’ inside us
that persistently nags us to write and if we’re not writing, we’re not
happy. Once that happens, of course, the
rest follows. We’ve all thrown away the keys.
But I am curious: do you feel you have other prisons you’ve
created for yourself?
And so:
I just got a lovely 4* review from InD’Tale Magazine for Bad
Boy, Big Heart, available at https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Boy-Big-Heart-Book-ebook/dp/B072MKG48B/:
“Bad Boy, Big Heart” is a fast
paced short story with such beautiful descriptions of the Wyoming countryside,
readers will feel as if they have been swept into the very pages of the book.
One cannot help but instantly fall in love with the characters, feel their
connection and share the struggle they face. .
. the
writing is beautifully vivid and the characters likable, with a plot that any
romance lover could easily sink their teeth into, especially if one enjoys a
quick, enjoyable read.”
Dahlia Gosney
