Writing, Distractions, and Obsessions

Who remembers Dark Crystal…A Jim Henson production, with all the characters puppets? Ambitious, a lot to like, and one of my husband’s favorites.  What I mostly remember were the hunched over characters trudging across the landscape, heading for the convergence. One. Slow. Step at a time.

Progress on Gabriel’s story is reminding me of their journey. One word after another dragged out of my creative self. Which is proving to be something of an advantage since my original thought was to have Gabriel in all his Alpha handsome glory partner up with Clair, my plucky plus size heroine…scratch the plucky part, I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to be alliterative. Then I started thinking about Gabriel needing to learn humility What better than to send him among humans minus his charisma.  Hmmm.

In the meantime I haven’t been sitting around contemplating the walls, and I’m not even trying real hard to improve my win percentage on Free Cell.  Honest.  Here in New Mexico we have a really short growing season and I have some ambitious ideas about what I want to grow this year.  So I’ve been busy outside.

There’s this chain link dog pen we’d been using as an outside play place for cats. It was set East/West and I wanted it

the old dog pen

North/South.  A 90-degree turn, and that pen had been in place for six years…coming up to

kind stuck into the ground

seven. Yikes.

Needed to dig it out, then start the turn. Since it’s mostly me and the dogs, I decided to try it

SUCCESS

on my own. Dug it out, then inched it around a little bit at a time. Until it was between the posts instead of next to them.

It wasn’t as difficult as I’d thought, just took a bit of time. And of course the dogs were NO help whatsoever.  Their job, they tell me, is to be lovely. My job is to make their world as lovely as they are, when I’m not tending to their every need.

Besides, they don’t much worry about the planting end of our lives, though they’re quite fond of the end result, especially zucchini.  If only we could grow avocados here.  Ah well, those we can get at the store.  Once the pen was shifted around, and the inside rearranged, I started

collecting supplies and starting the process

moving in all the various tubs and pots I’d had stashed around the place.  Those nifty green tubs will probably be used to hold pots instead of planting them directly, and there’s a stack of earth boxes ready to be assembled.

We just might have a garden this year. Even better, the pen can be wrapped in heavy plastic for a greenhouse come winter.

So I have been busy at something. The problem, other than writing blogs and going to the Book Fiesta and dog shows, is the basic distraction of living here.

How to concentrate with this sort of distraction?