Soft on weaklings
Today as I continue to come to terms with this inner ear disturbance, I am also turning to the work at hand.
All the house cleaning and office re-arranging has one purpose in mind ... to allow me to focus fresh energy on writing in the year ahead.
As I've gone through box after box, folder after folder, I've found countless notes to myself for stories, images and characters.
I've tried to save every one. As a matter of fact, I have an entire suitcase in the attic filled with such images and notes. That's to make sure that if the day comes when I run out of images, I'll have plenty of them stockpiled to write from.
Better writers than me would have tossed these scraps a long time ago. Gardeners, even, have a good rule of thumb -- they will toss out any underperforming plant without any emotion at all. Even my own mother, who personifies compassion, will rip up a spindly, yellow flower in a New York minute.
On the other hand, I will nurse and nurture the tiniest sprout, even if it never does anything. A personal point of pride is the Wandering Jew (tradescantia zebrina) I now have in a pot. After the cats ate it down to a leaf the size of a pencil eraser, I hovered over it for months as it grew, first a single proper leaf, and now four. It is a ghost of a plant, but it came from near nothing and now, it survives.
So ... back to these ideas of mine. Are they sickly and not worth saving, like the plants most gardeners would throw in the compost? Or, like the tradescantia, do I save every pitiful mind dropping as if it were Fitzgerald?
TOMORROW: More of the same, but with feeling
