UNUSED GEARS (NUDITY ALERT)

 

 {The goddess, Tyme, courtesy of the fabulous Leonora Roy}

 

QUIT YOUR JOB TO WRITE FULL TIME!   I DID.  YOU SHOULD, TOO.

So said one post I recently visited.  Ah, I really like to eat and sleep out of the rain so that advice was just silly.

Oh, she also said Americans were too fat,

were possessed by their possessions,

and usually had loveless relationships ...

and beans were bad for you.

(Mostly true ... except for the beans ... beans are bad for those around you.)

I've written this some tongue-in-cheek (but not much).

  Here is her post to provide her side of things:
http://www.kseniaanske.com/blog/2012/10/17/you-can-write-full-time-quit-your-job.html#comments

Tammy Theriault wrote an amusing, insightful post on how she made use of the time she had

to write whenever, wherever she could:
http://tammybr2.blogspot.com/2012/10/you-can-do-it-anywherea-car-bowling.html

So what about my title: UNUSED GEARS?

When Victor Standish's age, I had a bike with one gear for everything:

 outracing Old Ones,

smacking evil trolls who were assaulting the head cheerleader of my school,

and other assorted heroics that swirled in my head as I rode to and back from school.

When I became an adult (at least in years), I bought a bike with more gears than a Swiss Army knife has doo-hickies.

Not that I used them all.  Who knew what they all were for?

I used basically three out of the army of gears available to me.

But the gears were there waiting for me to use.  The same with time.  All of us are given the same quota.

Some just use it more effieciently than others.

We all stand in too many lines, scrub in the great echo chamber of our shower, sit in too many doctor offices.

Carry a notebook.  You balk about writing a whole page of your novel in such settings.

Write bits of dialogues.  They're short.  And you get to borrow from the snatches of conversation going on around you.

Or write splashes of descriptions of exotic locales or the characters in your novel.  Dialogue and descriptions don't demand you put down a beginning, middle, and end.

Carry a mini-tape recorder.  Leave it by your bed to speak into it on a vivid dream you just had that would be perfect for your novel.

(That saves you from having to make out the senseless scribblings scrawled on a notebook page in the dark!)

The recorder is great for when you are stuck in traffic. 

Do not use it while actually driving.  Distracted driving kills, and I want you around to visit my cyber-home!