Rainy days and cool fronts make me happy! I love rain on days when I'm home and snuggled up with a good book, or watching some sporting event with Mr. W. Sometimes like today we split up-- I'm watching the Tx Rangers trying to clinch the division and he's flipping back and forth between the Rangers and a gazillion college football games. I love sports- I love football, but college football makes me go bleh.
Anyway, so I'm sitting in my recliner watching the Rangers, and I'm looking out into the backyard. It's all green and glowy from all the rain, and I realized that a good portion of it is covered in a low growing vine. When did that happen?
I love vines. I love the way they climb and cover and cling. What's more romantic than a vine covered cottage? A honeysuckle laden fence? An ivy covered college building? For me they evoke nostalgia, home fires, and coziness. The vine in my back yard evokes neither. It's not covering my worn fence. It's not creeping up the handy trellis that is sitting there being ignored. It's marching insolently across the ground instead of seeking a higher ambition.
Some days my writing feels like a groundhugging vine, spreading and multiplying but only occasionally wrapping a tendril around an idea that pulls it up to a higher level. And no one has to remind me that people with well behaved vines take the time to train them, to deliberately direct their vines in the way they want it to grow.
I'm guilty of clinging to the romantic notion that I can allow my writing the freedom to travel where it will, and I'll still end up with the results I want. The longer I write I've reluctantly come to accept that on occasion, I have to get down on my hands and knees and pull some of those wide-ranging vines up by their stubborn roots, stomp on them, burn them and bury the ashes in a shallow grave under a full moon.
I struggle and rail against this idea, even while knowing it's necessary. Then I have to decide which ones are still moving in the right direction and help them stay on course. That doesn't mean I have to manicure the life out of my story, but I have to acknowledge those wandering plot threads that can choke the life out of it just as easily.
Meanwhile, the Rangers have a 3-1 lead in the 7th , and the bossy vine in my backyard creeps ever closer.
