Imagine that last April, almost exactly a year ago from today, you began your current novel project, Songs for Piano and Voice.  A departure from your first novel, it’s a contemporary romantic dramedy about a pianist and a singer who just can’t quite get their relationship in tempo thanks to an ex, a nosy pastor’s wife, a smothering older sister, a drug addict, and romantic rivals.  It’s set at a fictional Methodist church in Waco, Texas, and in the very real Baylor University School of Music, where you yourself spent a semester studying vocal performance — though the story’s not based on personal acquaintances or experiences.  Much.   (Though who knows?   Maybe if you hadn’t changed your major to English literature, it would be autobiographical.  Ah, the endless drama of musicians!)

In a year, you’ve written sixteen chapters, totaling upwards of 80,000 words.  You’re either two-thirds or half of the way finished with your first draft.  You’re not really sure which.  All you know is that you’ve finished the first of two “movements” and at this point  have no way of gauging how long the second will be.  You know the end of the novel — the end was actually the starting point of the whole thing — and you know the major plot points between the first movement and the end.  But only the actual writing will tell just how long it will take to get from here to there. Or how to get from here to there.  Which scares you a little, because writing blind is the surest way to write yourself into a corner, though you did manage to avoid that with the first 80,000 words, which you also wrote blindly till you got to the end.

80,000 words sounds like a lot to a non-writer.  Or even to a writer.  Until you break it down into the number of days you work per year and get something like an average of 450 words per day.  And then you think about the other writers you know, who have written entire 100,000 word novels in 100 days, and then you start to wonder what the heck you’re doing wrong.  (Or maybe they’re doing something wrong?)  So it’s best not to think about other writers or break it down into numbers and averages, and instead just revel in the fact that this year you’ve written 80,000 words that a couple of other writer friends really like, and, even more importantly, that you like (or at least don’t think are utter crap), and oh thank God that terrible eighteen month dry spell that followed your first novel is long gone!

For now, you can spend seven nights and eight days at Walt Disney World, and worry about increasing your average daily word count when you get back.

The other day I was musing on the fact that this blog is titled “Inkblots in the Life of an Author,” yet I make very few posts about the authorial part of my life.  Probably most of you think I don’t actually do any authoring.  Rest assured, I do write, every day, from about 10 AM to 4 or 5 PM.  Respectable working hours, almost as if I had a real job!  (And I do generally take my meals at my desk while I work, so I think it’s okay that I don’t start at 8 or 9 like most working people.)

Anyway, all that to say, I actually have something from my writing to blog about today.

When you are a writer, you learn many fascinating things.  Usually these are nuggets of trivia gleaned from researching, but occasionally, they come from your own head.  For example, today I was tweaking the end of chapter thirteen, which I finished last week, and skimmed through to discover that Cupid doesn’t just stick to his day job.  Apparently, he also moonlights as a composer of piano music.

(Consider yourselves very fortunate to get the first ever sneak-peek of Songs for Piano and Voice, hopefully coming to a bookstore near you sometime this decade.)

“Have you ever considered that maybe I’m with a woman who’s so stunningly beautiful that I can’t think about what any other woman looks like?”

Laura blinked, twice.  “Good line,” she said, breathily.  Possibly experiencing the same fluttering sensations as John was, as if someone were using his organs as a keyboard to play Cupid’s “Minute Waltz.”

Eleven years of piano lessons, and I had no idea that anyone but Frédéric Chopin had written a Minute Waltz.  But lo, there is another one — and by Cupid, no less!

Okay, the jig’s up.  That was supposed to say Chopin’s Minute Waltz, but somehow my fingers took leave of my brain and typed Cupid’s.  This is so much worse than the time I was editing my work and found a completely made-up word.  Where did that come from?!

Really, I worry about myself sometimes, and about my future publication endeavors.  How will anyone ever be able to edit my work if they don’t know what the heck I’m trying to say?!

Does it count for anything that I know the above punctuation (?!) is properly called an interrobang?    No?  Okay then.  Back to work.  I’ve got to torture a pianist, recently struck by Cupid’s arrow, with the return of his ex-wife.

…at least until tomorrow, when the high temperature is going to be a good twenty degrees below today’s high temperature.  Of course, it was 85ish today, and I do realize that 65ish isn’t exactly winter weather.  However, unlike today, I will not be lying out on a blanket in a linen skirt and spaghetti strap top for six hours if the high is only 65ish.  (Maybe I’ll lie out on a blanket in jeans and a light jacket.  My mildly sunburned shoulders and upper back would probably appreciate that.)

But I think someone once said not to worry about tomorrow, so for now I’m going to focus on today, and the fact that while out on my morning jog, I noticed that amid the brown barrenness of winter, things are wick.

Such as the Bradford pear trees:

The cherry’s also a-bloom:

As is our next-door neighbor’s pink magnolia, which I can see from my kitchen window, but had to stand on one of the patio chairs to snap a picture:

Lilies are starting to sprout, though I doubt they’ll be blooming in time for Easter:

The irises are coming up, too:

Trimmed all the way back for winter, in just a few weeks, the rose bushes are thick with new growth.  (I love the deep red.)

Here and there are even little bursts of colorful bloom:

And daffy daffodils sway in the breeze:

For those of you who have real winters, I’m sure the signs of spring are even more affecting than for those of us who live in milder climates.  (I’m thinking of Alyssa in Illinois, who has been clinically diagnosed as in hibernation, and my in-laws in Minnesota, who are having a snowstorm, and my favorite author Neil Gaiman, who blogged today about digging a van out of a snowbank.)  Yet even though I haven’t experienced much of a winter by any definition, I couldn’t be kept indoors today.  I wanted to soak up the sun, to be surrounded by reminders that life doesn’t stay the same all the time, that it’s a constant cycle of change and rebirth and growth — and that I’m a part of that cycle.

This time last year, I was muddling along writing a short story a month to try and break myself of the winter of uncreativity that followed the completion of my first novel.  But when spring came, the flowers bloomed, and so did an idea that is now a novel of 70,000 words and counting.  (By the time I finish the first draft, I anticipate it being at something like 150,000 words and subtracting — because I think about half those words need to be edited out.)

It’s not a brilliant novel.  It’s just a romantic comedy — well, maybe a romantic comedy.  While it’s funny, I’m not sure it exactly falls into the comedy category.  But I can’t really call it a romance, either, because it’s not full of bodice ripping and torrid sex.  I guess it’s really just chick-lit.  Hopefully smart chick-lit.  But I’ll settle for chick-lit, if it means I have an audience.  That’s one of the things I’ve realized from last spring to this spring, one of the changes I’ve undergone from writing my first novel to working on this novel:

I don’t have to write something important.  I just have to write something important to me.

And so I’m writing a novel that takes place at my alma mater, Baylor University.  It’s about a pianist and a singer.  It’s about past relationships and the hold they have on us.  It’s about difficult friendships.  It’s about the ways people cope with those things — religion, drugs, relationships, music.  It’s about dreams, and goals, and compromise.  It’s about love.  (Between a young woman and a slightly older man, because, I’ll admit it, those are the kinds of pairings I always go for when I read.)  All things that are important to me.  And, I hope, important to enough other people that I can get a publisher’s advance and a few royalty checks.

Today I chose to spend six hours outside, listening to the classical radio station on my mp3 player, scribbling ten pages of a notebook to bring a couple of imaginary people to life.  Not because I’m destined to be the next Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, but because I’m lucky enough to get to do what I want to do.

Today, I think I did it well.