…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.