I remember toward the end of July I decided to create a Blood-Red Pencil blog post early for August as well as finally posting to my own blog which has sat neglected since February 3rd. And then suddenly it was August 15th. No Blood-Red Pencil post. No post to my personal blog. What happened? I know I did stuff over the last month. I see the notations on my calendar. A cortisone shot in my arthritic shoulder (which did not help). My annual checkup which I passed with flying colors (for my age). A Saturday morning Crowdcast online event called Mystery in the Midlands . A grooming appointment for Sassy. Curbside pickups for groceries. A couple more online writing programs. A solid effort to apply the edits to my current almost-finished frontier fiction manuscript called In Defense of Delia . Critiques for two writers’ group meetings. And yet, without that calendar to look at, I might have had a hard time remembering what I did in the last four weeks to fill up all that ti...

Wow, the month of May slid by and here I sit, looking back and wondering what happened to all that time. Time seems particularly slippery during these shelter-in-place months. Back in March, I thought I would get so much done . Let's just say it didn't work out as I'd planned. Time doesn't stop while sheltering in place. Image by xaviandrew from Pixabay As I write this, my mind wanders to various musical pieces that have to do with the passage of time. The first few songs that come to mind are some personal favorites: George Harrison's All Things Must Pass   Simon and Garfunkle's A Hazy Shade of Winter   The Beatles' A Day in the Life   Pink Floyd's Time   Oh, let's not forget As Time Goes By  from the movie Casablanca . This leads me to wonder if there might be lists of songs that have "time" as a theme or element. Time for research! Here's some of what I found (the first two lists have embedded YouTube videos so...

A few weeks ago, I had a dream. Or maybe it wasn't really a dream, but a vision. I was half awake in that suspended time before dawn. All my joints ached, and even worse, my foot throbbed from where I'd crashed into a wooden box earlier in the day, breaking my middle toes. It was just enough pain to send me over the edge. With tears streaming down my face, I whispered, "Just let me go. I can't hurt like this anymore." You can't go yet. You have ten books to write. What? The thought had slammed into my head. Not mine. It came from somewhere else, and you can bet I bolted straight out of bed! I limped into the kitchen for water, heart pounding. What the hell? I started thinking about the books I had in process, how long it might take to finish them, and how much time I actually needed to stay alive to complete this mission. Ten years would do it, I figured. I could write a book a year, and that would be generous, with plenty of time for revision and a...

Time can change according to circumstances. Here are a few examples, which you may find true. 1. Lunch hours and breaks go by faster than the same amount of time spent in a dentist’s chair or at a doctor’s office. 2. At the beginning of a vacation, there seems to be a lot of time, but by the end, you didn't do everything you wanted to do. 3. Getting an agent or publisher to accept a manuscript can take longer than to write one. 4. A Facebook hour goes by faster than a synopsis hour. 5. The older you get the faster time seems to fly. If you’re still young, you won’t notice this right away, but it will happen. 6. Similar to the one above - What seems to have happened last year actually happened at least five years ago. 7. Busy people make time to do more, while those who are not busy can barely do what they already do. 8. If you quit your day job, you’ll find more time to write. Someone, tell me, is this one true? I threw it in as wishful thinking. It hasn’t happened...