After all, you can only do so much Facebook, or other social media platforms, before the memes all start to look the same, and run together like a badly painted watercolor. I know about water colors. When my family went on fishing trips, I didn’t have the patience to just sit there with a rod and reel, so I would sit there with my watercolors and a sketchpad and paint what I saw on the shores of the lake. Once we went to southern Canada, Mille du Lacs, thousand lakes, and there was so much beauty to paint. I am the artist of the family, but my forte is painting pictures with words, not so much literally with a brush and palette. Still, it was fun. I ended up writing a short story based on the trip.
If you are the artistic type, with paints and brushes as well as with words, that is one thing you can do to keep yourself relatively sane while waiting for your edits. I’m more likely to paint with an embroidery needle and floss these days. I made a hanging, some years ago, when I first arrived in Sacramento. The intake therapist I saw to place me with a permanent therapist had a wooden crescent hanging in her office with the legend that read ”What would you attempt if you knew you would not fail?” It filled my head with ideas, so many that I knew I had to capture it on fabric with embroidery floss. So I put it together, and eventually finished it. All it needed is a stretcher frame and a way to hang it on the wall.
And of course, you can work on your WIPs, to give your poor beleaguered publisher.editor even more to do, eventually. Currently, I am working on a Wip I started during Camp NaNoWriMo last year. I had to drop out of both early because I had shingles, a most unpleasant disease, which I would wish only on my worst enemy, and three months later in July, because I was so anxious about my diagnosis from a breast biopsy I had. I don’t like being anxious. I take great strides trying to avoid anxiety attacks. If you are subject to them on a regular or semi-regular basis, I salute you. I don’t know how you get through them. I couldn’t concentrate to write. I kept running through the worst case scenario in my head. By the time the negative (it pays to think negative in this case I adopted a new mantra; benign. I spread BENIGN BENIGN BENIGN BENIGN all through Facebook. I wonder now what Mr. Zuckerberg and his AI cronies and algorithms must’ve thought of my posting it up on my status like a madwoman. Words cannot express my extreme joy when I got the result. Benign, of course. It was just some calcified cells) the benign result arrived, I had had to drop out a second time. But now, I am determined to finish at least the first draft. So that is what I am working on now. Tomorrow I start Chapter 21.
Then there’s YouTube and TV. My favorite things to watch on YouTube are funny cat videos and the late great Victor Borge. I LOVE to laugh at cats. I realize that in ancient Egypt they were worshiped as deities, and I call our cat “our little deity,” but when I see a cat acting oh, so dignified, then taking a pratfall, as long as I know the precious creature came to no harm, I’m all belly laughs and guffaws. And the maestro Borge, the Great Dane, as a language nerd, I love how he approaches language. Of course, you realize that he’s approaching English as an outsider. English was probably his third or fourth, or even fifth language, but it’s still funny. And then there’s Netflix. I have discovered so many treasures by streaming gems of TV shows from all over the world. Just now, I’m streaming the 4th season of Lucifer. Fox cancelled it, probably under pressure from the jesoids, who probably hated the new look their true lord was getting. So there you have it; what to do while waiting for your edits. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve gotta look at my dedicated writing gmail account to see if PB has sent then like she said she had.
