Today, as I stare out of my living room window in the middle of the day, I watch the sky become darker and darker. I am sure we are about to have an atmospheric river dumped on us or a pile of snow! Believe it or not, while I was in the bank yesterday, I noticed their weather chart showed sunny days all week. I remember thinking, funny, that’s not what the weather on my computer shows. They were beautifully optimistic. I want the spring weather back. My seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is overtaking me. While I try to motivate myself to sit at my computer and start one of the many writing projects I have heaped onto my plate, I have been Contemplating the letter C in the alphabet and how it plays out in my daily ability to write. Below is a list of C words that affect my daily writing life.

Creative, Conundrum, Cup of Coffee, Chores, Clutter, Clean, Coping, Challenge, Calm, Comfortable, Commit.

I accept that I am Creative, yet I am often caught up by my Conundrum of where I start first. I love my garden, and if and when the sun is shining, I want to go out and futz around in it. There are the art things I am both making and recreating in my attic that I want to finish. Then there are the two writing groups I am in. That means I sometimes have two different pieces to write. I make my first Cup of Coffee to go with my breakfast and then another to fortify myself at the computer and write. But before I can start, I am distracted by the various tasks my possibly neurodivergent mind throws at me. The Chores and Clutter around the house that I must Clean up first. Much later, I may be able to settle down to Coping with the creative writing Challenges in a Calm and Comfortable way, and Commit to the process. 

There you have it, dear readers, some of the C words necessary in the sometimes overwhelmed and not-so-daily process of my writing life.

I sometimes wonder how I managed to actually write and finish a book. But I have. It is my big C of writing—46,000 plus words in the memoir of my early childhood CHOSEN, Buy now on Amazon.

A self-published book about my childhood growing up in the Caribbean Islands of Barbados, Monserrat, and St. Vincent, between eleven months and fourteen years.

George Edward Francis, Author and member of The Blue Bottles Writing Studio, wrote: A visit to Jane’s Garden of Eden(s) is both fascinating and mysterious. Like Jane’s toy kaleidoscope, her tale is vivid and full of colorful imagery, revealing an exotic life one can only imagine.

Opening paragraph from CHOSEN

According to my birth mother, whom I didn’t know until I was a young and immature teenager — I was conceived out of wedlock from a date rape in Barbados and born in a back room of a house in Bridport, England. 

My grandmother came to England from the Caribbean on the pretence of being lonely and wanting to visit her daughters. She planned to adopt me without telling her husband I was his youngest daughter’s child. My grandmother wanted to protect my mother and me from scandal. When my grandmother left England and took me back to Barbados, I was eleven months of age. I wouldn’t hear from my mother again until I was over fourteen years old. 

Until the next time: EJP