Roads to Joy

So I began the day on a different schedule: quick coffee, then a dash to the dump (aka Household Waste Recycling Centre) in Allendale so as to get back for my beloved to have time to return to the village for choir practice and the knitter-knatter group. But the rain was pouring down, and it was a wet exercise putting the bits and pieces in their proper receptacles: paper; cardboard; metal; small electricals; clothing; and a few old suitcases which couldn’t go anywhere else but the landfill.

I did get the recycling tasks accomplished, and breakfast was ready for me on my return. But the normality of my daily schedule was confused, disrupted ever-so-slightly. I did the washing-up with aplomb and put everything away. I zoomed around upstairs with the Dyson animal vacuum cleaner to tidy up the detritus from the loft removal exercise. Then I cleaned out the fire, and set it again, for warmth this evening. Then I set to on my daily writing exercises, and having finished today’s social history entry for the Allendale Lions Club I could finally embark, rather later than usual, on my regular foray into joy.

Everything feels upside down! Usually I look for the joy at the beginning of each day, but today, as the sun streams in and the streaky, wispy clouds clear to reveal some blue, I’m enjoying that marginal feeling of disorientation. Rather odd, and yet stimulating at the same time.

In the meantime, I’ve had a couple of pieces of reinforcement to bring some cheerfulness to my writing odyssey:

i. Our mentor in the Sci-Fi Writers Group reminds me of the admonition tucked away in Save the Cat! Writes a Novel, that the components of a novel are like the ingredients of a meal. Everybody approaches the meal with these similar ingredients, but each of us is a unique cook. So I should not lose heart on my novelistic endeavours, it seems, but try to believe in myself better.

ii. A discovery of a kind of one-off newsletter that I created for the Lions Club, some sixteen years ago, shows me that I’ve been working at being a public writer and communicator for rather a long time. That little newsletter was certainly whimsical and unique. I shall be writing about it next in my social history blog.

iii. Well, there is no third encouragement, particularly, on this discombobulated day, but two are enough to be getting on with. Just finding joy in this odd feeling of disorientation, that should suffice for now.