To read an excerpt from the book, please click on the following link:

ashaveilbook.blogspot.com

An excerpt from The Pleasure Palace, my romantic comedy, can be found here:



Sunday, November 30, 2014

To Find the Time

It may seem that I have huge amounts of time opened up since deciding to retire, but one has to remember that I have a five-year-old granddaughter/daughter who requires a great deal of time to work with.  I have a stack of her clothes to mend, bills to pay, a house to keep repairing, 90 percent of which I must do on my own.  I feel I have one really good book left in the one I am writing; it can contain many threads that I, too, can weave into the story: betrayals in relationships, having to leave people I love because of deceitful, disrespectful, or outright harmful behavior.  I don't think Asha was ever called "crazy" by any of these men, though I suspect McClish would have resorted to that one at some point, given he was recorded saying this about other women.  I know what it is to have to break my life in half because someone had already broken everything and I discovered it, as happened a year ago.  I certainly know what it is to be pregnant and, though afraid, forge ahead to  make a life for a baby even though the man in my life did not want it, and also to protect a pregnancy as I did in 2009.

I find that, as a writer, if I want to find the time, I have to make it so.  When I drop Thistle off at school, I find I am so tired still from the 6:30 wake-up and all the stress of getting her out of the house that I literally will recline the seat in my car and sleep for a couple of hours there.  It's pleasant and nice, but it certainly is not productive.  I don't want to sit in cafes all the time as I want to have the quiet space to work and don't want to spend so much money on coffee--it does add up.  I don't usually want to go home as it is far from her school and uses up huge amounts of gas to and fro.

My therapist and I discussed options for this, and I pinpointed the Scotts Valley Library as a library in which I might work; it has conference rooms which are private and which I might be able to reserve.  I know the things I need to write well are quiet, a well-lit space, and lack of interruption (the latter of which is not possible when raising a young child).  I also like the Art Bar and Cafe Bene, as well as the County building cafe.

So,  this week it is finding places to write, and beginning to make contacts with people who knew Asha.

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