This blue day

Oh, my goodness — the cherry tree outside my window on this blue day!

This was the same tree just a few months ago —

And now — I don't know if you can tell from the photographs — its twigs have the sticky-out-bits of new buds almost ready to break! Be encouraged, friends shivering in chilly America, Spring is coming, it really is!

This morning I have turned my attention to the task for this quarter, writing a book under contract for submission in early summer. One of the big challenges of any book is writing the opening section. If that isn't interesting, you've lost your reader from the start. I often set the opening section aside to be written at some later stage when I've thought how to succinctly express introductory thoughts, but this morning in the bath I knew how I wanted to put it, and rushed into my room to get it all down before the ideas evaporated like so much bathroom steam. Nothing worse than lost words trickling mournfully down the window pane.

Nailed it! We're off! 

So now it's a thousand words a day with gaps here and there for preparing Sunday worship and whatnot.  I already made very full notes to support my original proposal to the publisher, so everything's in place. This is non-fiction, so what I want to say is not something elusive that will wander off like a bored cat if I take my attention out of it for five minutes. It's firmly grounded, rooted in the Bible and expressed in the daily practice of discipleship. No doubt it will have its challenges — it never pays to get too cocky about any writing endeavour! But for once I'm looking forward to it instead of feeling utterly daunted. It doesn't have the capriciousness and easily frightened-off quality of fiction, where you have to stalk it with such silent patience and the slightest interruption can alarm and scatter it.

Even so, I'll get up early to write, and put the Engaged sign on my door, because the Muse is a shy wee beastie and you do have to focus.

But today's portion is written, so hooray.