Whoa, It's Summer Again.

Got a little off the kilter (whatever that may be) this morning because after I finished meditating, I went directly to editing the rewritten stories. I guess I was in a hurry. It wasn't until I'd corrected four of them that I realized that I hadn't been here to write my daily Vanderspacebeek piece.

Somehow I survived but no one knows how close it came. For that, I'm grateful. A miss is as good as a mile.

So here I am. Do with me as you will. But please leave me with my fingers warmed up and ready to go.

It's a little strange these days, what with doing the rewrites, that I'm not launching myself into that daily scrape of creating a short story on the fly. I miss it, in a way. Of course, in another way, I don't miss it because it's really daunting to be creative on demand, as part of a calendar approach.

Here's another lesson. I need to get used to writing a story, rewriting it a couple times, make all the changes I think necessary and do the polishing and then, after all that, if it still doesn't seem right. I need to be ready to can it. Either throw it out or put it on some dark shelf for reconsideration at a later time.

That's hard for me to do. It's like bringing home the real stinkers from shop class and leaving them sitting around on the mantlepiece for 30 years, just because I made them. If they're bad they need to go. I'm thinking now about the story Michael Kenner's Big Deal Secret. I need to take that story down and recycle the words in dog food commercials. Something like that. It really is like a Paul Harvey piece.

All those old groaners need to be moved out. Maybe moved over to the Vanderspacebeek page, so I can look at them periodically as a reminder of when I wasn't famous. Ha, ha.

Seriously, I should at least clean up the shop's front window (that's an analogy for the Rising-Gorge site, get it?).

I like the writing part and I'm beginning to like the editing part more, especially when there's feedback from someone else available. Otherwise, it's just like being trapped inside Dennis Whats-his-name, the protagonist from Locked Out, arguing with myself all the time. Nothing real can come from that.

OK, I think I'm ready to get on with things here. My fingers are working wonderfully well. Oswego!

More later,