Happy August and happy new moon.
Already the season is shifting. There are blackberries ripe in every hedge, figs and plums coming ripe too. Have you noticed a change in the light? It’s dark again in the mornings when I make coffee.
How is this summer going for you? And for your writing? Does the change in weather and responsibilities make it harder or easier to get your writing done?
The first half of my year was focused on revision, so it seems like a long time since I was in an easy, productive writing season. I figured it was a good time for a new crop of one word writing prompts.
No great expectation here. Just showing up to the page most mornings, spending seven minutes writing with whatever memory or emotion the word brings up. And giving myself credit.
I’d love for you to join me! For a High Harvest!
I think the shift towards fall is making me feel like writing more. Old associations with the school year perhaps? I am trying to develop a habit of writing to take with me into the homeschool year. I am worried that homeschool responsibilities will disrupt what I have started. One way that I am hoping to combat that is by picking read aloud titles that are exciting for me and are part of my research!
This has been a summer interrupted by one h have of household sickness after another.
All three girls had pneumonia in mid July. Just in time to interrupt Bella’s graduation party. Though she was fortunately recovered enough to go on her five day retreat with the Daughters of St Paul.
Then Ben got a bunch of mysterious aches and pains and fatigue that sent us to the urgent care where a million tests came up negative. Only for me to get the same symptoms— plus fever!— a few days later.
Poor Ben’s been sick since pretty much the start of June. Now I’m wondering if it’s partly long covid.
Anyway I got sick at dinner the night before my birthday. So I turned fifty with no celebration. Just burning in bed on a rack of pain binge watching The Bear just to distract myself. Too sick to even read. Oh and then your book arrived to cheer me up just in time, Kortney, thank you. I haven’t been able to read it yet. But just the sight of it — and your note— have been a balm.
I’m writing from urgent care now. Hoping I don’t have pneumonia. The kids are all supposed to go to BSA summer camp on Saturday and I’m praying they make it. Fearing they’ll all come down sick. Wondering how I’ll have the energy to get them packed.
I really hope this fall is a season of writing. I keep hoping to start a substack of my own to replace my poor blog which has become too expensive to maintain. But life keeps getting in the way. Still I’m going to print out your word hoard and Stowe it away in my notebook as a promise to myself to do my best to get some words on paper.
Recently the little writing I’ve accomplished has been a prayer journal. Mostly just other peoples prayer requests and quotes and scripture passages. But small bits of me here and there. Maybe the not writing is the point.
This is yet another fallow season but I know planting time will come again
We had rain this morning and my fever broke and I took my tea and oatmeal onto the patio to eat under the gazebo. I eventually started puttering with pulling the deadheads off my pansies and then moseyed over to the garden where I did some weeding while the cool drizzle fell. It was nice to do battle with the carpet we’d and creeping Charlie and grass and dandelions and whatnot. I’ve got two dozen volunteer tomatoes spring from compost or fallen fruit from last year. And a bunch of marigolds. And maybe a couple of sunflowers. Funny how sickness and rain can slow me down enough to tend to my neglected garden.