O what a glorious, glorious day this is! After hours of feverish effort this afternoon, I’ve completed my epic poem about President James K. Polk! I’m weary and exhilarated and terribly, terribly proud. O, yes, it’s a first draft, and the metre sags in spots, and I might well have glossed over some of my research (or did President Polk really have a pet pterodactyl??), but I can fix all that later. For now, it is enough to rejoice in completion!
My friends, I am not ashamed to tell you that I wept as I wrote the stanzas about President Polk’s death from cholera; and I know my readers will be equally moved when they read my verse.
Your exercise today is twofold:
1. Celebrate something! What have you achieved lately? Celebrate even the tiniest of successes. Celebrate! Tell us, in the comments, what you are celebrating, and how.
2. Carry this enthusiasm and joy into your work! Let your characters win a battle, for once. Let them find something in which they can rejoice. There’s always time for conflict: but no person’s tale should be only conflict and strife; let your characters enjoy a brief moment before you hurl them back into the maelstrom of your story.
Rejoice! Jubilantly!
And now, my lovelies, I have some some private celebrating to attend to!
I am celebrating the passing of an illness (both mental and physical) that has stolen much time away from me. I have time again, and though it does still slip away, it does not sift as fast as it once did, when my addled, over-prescribed mind could not sense its overpowering beauty. Now I relish the taste of it–and did you know time has a smell? It smells like paprika sometimes, and also like the forest floor, pungent, gritty, all rotting hopes and dreams, death, with rebirth budding beneath ageless soil.
I celebrate by savoring a moment and then letting twenty moments fly by. And yes, by enjoying pie. It spirals around me, tosses me. It flees. I may yet catch it.
Lovely Agent Rocket, I know exactly what you mean! I just experienced an instant of time that smelled like ripe bananas and lipstick!