Today was a good day....

Last week I wrote about my fear of failure as I received two rejections from agents who I had queried on my the previous novel I'd completed and started sending out for representation. My feelings of helplessness were compounded by opening the file for the chapter I was to revise for my current novel the "Glass Mystery" and realizing that I had no idea of how to tackle it.

I should pause to explain that I stopped writing for four years, leaving three novels that I had completed sitting in files on my computer untouched. A year ago, in March, I began tentatively, to write again by opening these novels one by one, chapter by chapter and revising them. This journey was actually the impetus for this blog, as I have detailed in previous posts. The journey has been a fruitful one, and certainly enjoyable as it got me writing again and brought me to the realization of how much I enjoyed the process of writing.

All of this came to a halt last week with those two rejections. They were the final straw in a culmination of second guessing my current path in life, a reflection of what I had accomplished in life and where I was headed. This was compounded by my frustration in not having decided yet where I would be going in September, where I would spend that month in the mountains. And then I opened that file of the next chapter in my current novel and seeing that what I had written seemed to have nothing to do with the direction I was taking the current revision, simply led me to a complete and depressed halt. Which is what that post about how to deal with disappointment was all about.

For a few days my blog remained silent, I had nothing to say. I am grateful for the kind comments I received. Thank you, they meant a great deal. I tried to rally by posting my favorite recipe for gazpacho soup. I've found that when my mind is in its mulling mode, it's best for me to head to the kitchen, to work with my hands, or take a walk, or read a book, which is what I did on Sunday when I stayed in bed for most of the day to read John Dunning's The Bookwoman's Last Fling, a terrific mystery.

Today, the fog has lifted. Visiting a real estate website, I found a small town outside of Denver that seems to offer homes both the acreage that I want as well as a price that I can afford. And then through the day, my mind began to offer me snippets of sentences, a new direction to take in that wayward chapter. And so I've spent this evening, after another long walk, writing those ideas into the chapter, and I like what I'm writing. Finally, the momentum has returned.

So here's what we can look forward to: tomorrow I will be posting the new chapter. And in the following days I will post another recipe, a photographic essay of tonight's dinner featuring two of my favorite dishes.

Today was a good day.

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