The Thing About Living at The Beach

The thing about living at the beach is that you have to actually LIVE at the beach. You have to go through the everyday-ness of life, while you're living 2 blocks from the beach.

I still have to get up and sit down at my desk and write my pages. I still have to go to work. I still have to cook dinner and wash laundry and scrub bathrooms and pull weeds (though the weeds are winning in the back-yard rose bed...) (And since it's really humid and takes everything a long time to dry out, the bathrooms have to be scrubbed a lot because that black stuff grows everywhere constantly--ugh!)

But the thing is--today (and Monday) I got to sit down at my desk after going out to walk along the beach. Not just along the beach, but actually in the water. I get to look at the birds (I really, really need to remember to look up those kildeer-like plover things) and the rocks and the shells and the sky. The wind blows my hair every which way, and the salt makes it stick like that. And I'm at The Beach.

No, I can't spend all day hanging out there, floating in the waves or digging in the sand--I could, I suppose, if I wanted to. Some Saturday could be available. But it's probably a good thing that I don't really have all day, because every time I spent all day at the beach in the past, I got sunburned. Badly, if it was pre-sunscreen days. Even these days, I'd get sunburned, even with the sunscreen, because I'm that susceptible to the sun. So, yeah. An hour or two, when the sun's on it's way down, or up--that's probably best. And then I can go home and clean up and eat sand-free supper.

I simply need to remember not to take it for granted. Remember to spend time there, walking on the sand or in the water, biking down the Seawall, floating on the waves.It's my happy place, in this town. My place to commune with nature and God and to just...be. Where's yours?

Coming up short

Back in the day -- about two years ago-- I made a vow which I'll call the 2-2-2-2 vow. The upshot of this vow is that EACH year I would always try to end up in 2 fiction anthologies, hook up with 2 printed journal/ezine magazine editors, publish 2 poems in a poetry anthology, and write 2 essays for non-fiction anthologies. Hey, I was a lit major. We valued anthologized stuff. Anyways, here it is... almost 2008 and I haven't finished any short fiction let alone gotten accepted in any anthology. I've come up short.

In my own defense -- I always have something to say in my own defense-- unlike Hemingway who said he wrote his best short stories when he was avoiding his longer novels, I simply cannot truly focus on perfecting a short story when I'm in novel-mode. Either the short story starts becoming a novel, or I just flitter back and forth through all my Works-in-progress or play a computer solitaire game.

So now I'm trying to catch up. And strangely, three Asian-themed stories have popped into my mind. And, yay, one of them is almost finished. It's called So Far and it's written in future tense, second person. It's lovely and I just have to fight my novelistic soul which wants to turn it into a prequel for Wind Follower. ::shaking head here::

Anyway, there I was...all psyched to begin the second short story which wanted to be a monologue and which I decided to name Villager Uncle Li. Yep, my Asian obsession again. (Lord knows when this obsession began. Maybe after I saw the Jet Li movie, Hero.
But I go to my friend's house and her son says to me, "Ever heard of
Herman Li? He's great! As good as Buckethead." So of course, being a gal who listens to music in order to write, I end up spending my thanksgiving listening to Herman Li who, amazingly looks like how I pictured my main character Loic in Wind Follower. I also loved the coincidence and synchronity. The upshot of all this is that I actually felt as if God was urging me to finish my stories. The short ones about gorgeous Asian guys anyway.

Which gets me thinking. How am I gonna pay back all those artists -- visual or musical-- who have inspired me?
Folks like Dwight Yoakam, Jackson Browne,and
Axl Rose.

Yes, yes...although so much of my writing comes from some erotic part in my mind, there are some women aritst out there I actually listen to when I write. I just can't think of them right now.