Betty Whitaker Jackson

After taking a forced hiatus from writing for over a week, I find myself in a quandary. I thought last week that I had the free time to do a complete read-through of the 183 page draft of the book. I have given a copy to Faith, my illustrator, and for the most part had ignored writing time because two full days of babysitting intervened, plus my major role in putting on a Birthday Bash for the church’s Best Yet Set Party tomorrow. No excuse, I know. As a writer, I need to write frequently, but as a wife, mom, mother-in-law, church laywoman, and group-leader partner with several members of our small group in crisis right now, my attention has been anywhere but my creative writer mode.

That being said, when I returned to my writing yesterday, I began to see time discrepancies, and in an effort to revise one part, other parts became affected.  I know the rules. Write, write, write. Then revise.  I started revising, and now am in a real mess. I have cut and pasted whole sections of the story, now find redundancies, and even whole chapters which do not fit in sequence.

Although my muddled brain sees the whole picture, the details are now jumbled. I find it hard to scroll up and down on a computer screen. I may just have to print out the whole thing and resort to pencil and paper, colored pencils, marginal notes, and big crossout X’s to get me back into the swing of things.

Next week does not look much better. I’m committed to Friday and Tuesday around Labor Day to substitute teach, and I’m dallying on helping a fellow writer publish his book on CreateSpace. Also hanging over my head is working on two of my previous books which I lost in my computer hard drive crash. I have just gotten the original word documents back from Amazon CreateSpace so I can submit these manuscripts for ebook-Kindle publication.

Is my life scheming against Winter Wonderland? Sometimes I wish I could escape to a writer’s garret, or better yet, a lakeside cottage, and just let my creative juices flow. That’s a luxury other writers, usually men, have and probably enjoy. Meanwhile, I need to birthday shop and make 48 cupcakes now. Oh, and did I mention, this is concert weekend, so I babysit tonight, do the party tomorrow, volunteer tomorrow night and Sunday afternoon for the Space Coast Symphony, and babysit children at the concert tomorrow night? Oh, yeah, it’s Ministry Fair at church and daughter Nancy’s birthday Sunday too.

Winter Wonderland, you may just need to wait again. Visit you soon, I hope.