Here I am for the third time this week stuck at the Woodstock library while my sons are involved at school activities nearby. Today it’s an SAT practice test. This place is becoming my home-away-from-home or my public writing spot. I’m starting to recognize the employees. Yesterday a patron, who rolled up on his bicycle and locked it to the wooden railing out front, remembered me from earlier in the week and commented about something I’d said days earlier. I wonder if he’ll show up today. It’d be a great day to be on a bike.
I received a very nice letter from Shakespeare this week. It wasn’t actually from Shakespeare, but it read that way. It was actually from the dear author Terry Kay, a member of the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. He’s encouraging me along my way and says he owes me lunch or dinner. He doesn’t owe me anything, but I’ll certainly take him up on the invitation. Meeting up with him to discuss my work is enough incentive to get to those two short words that I look so forward to typing—The End.
As for now I’ve gotten to one of the trickiest parts in my story—the middle—just before the crisis, and it is a very tough part to write. I don’t want to write it. I’d rather write a research paper on bird behavior. I’d rather pull out the novel in my bag and read for the next three hours. I’d rather go get a peach milkshake from Chick-fil-A. Yet, I must push through. I know I can do it, and I will do it. I’m unclear at this point how it is going to go, but that is part of the journey. Yesterday I left my protagonist up in a tree all day. She was stuck too. Stuck in wood. I never did get her down, even at the end of the chapter. That’s okay. That’s how it ended. I didn’t plan that. The characters tell me what they’re going to do.
While I’m stuck here at the Woodstock Library, I better go visit with these characters and listen to what they’re going to tell me this morning. I hope they’re in talkative moods.