Donna Andrews

Elephant crossing

While driving home from the grocery store just now, I heard a traffic report on WTOP, our local all-news radio station.  Among the usual reports of disabled vehicles and mobile pothole crews, they also noted that traffic along several streets would be held up for periods today to allow the elephants to travel from the train station to the Verizon Center, where the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus will begin performing on Thursday.

This is almost as wonderfully strange as the day when the traffic reporters announced that yes, traffic on the Beltway had, indeed, been halted because a group of monkeys were gamboling on one of the overpasses and throwing rocks down on passing cars.

Of course, if you put this in a book, no one would believe you.

What a difference a few weeks makes

Photos of the daffodils in my front yard. On the left, February 17, several days after the great Valentine's Day snow and ice storm.  On the right, yesterday, with weather in the 70s. The snow doesn't appear to have damaged them at all.  That's one of the things I like about daffodils.  They're sturdy and stubborn.  If they're sprouting and budding and an untimely snowfall strikes, they just hunker down and wait till the warm weather comes back, and pick up where they left off.

I like to think there's some similarity between their persistence and my own approach to writing. You can't always control the interruptions, large and small, that try to throw you off the track.  You can't always control your mood--no one feels inspired all the time.  But you can hunker down till any storms pass and keep plodding along steadily.

I also realize that I hadn't been paying much attention to the daffodils.  Obviously there were intermediate stages while their stems got longer and the buds began to form and swell.  But I seem to have been focused elsewhere, making the sudden appearance of the first daffodil blossoms an exciting surprise.

That's actually the way I like to have books happen.  I don't mean that I expect them to appear like magic while I'm focused on something else--no ghostwriters on my payroll.  But I try not to obsess on a daily basis on how quickly my deadline is approaching and how many pages I've written and how many more I have to go.  That gets distracting.  I try to focus on each day's quota.  Get that done, and then celebrate.  If I do that, at some point it hits me that hey!  I've got the book 90% written!  It's almost painless.

Of course, as I said, that's the way I like it to happen.  Sometimes it's hard to trust the process, and I do end up obsessing over page totals.  Just as sometimes I'm impatient for the spring to arrive and all but stand over the buds tapping my foot, camera in hand, waiting for them to bloom already, dammit!  But I keep working on perfectly the patient, mellow approach.  Here's hoping the next book happens one tenth as painlessly as this year's first daffodils.