Wednesday's Words for January 17, 2018

Today is R plus 54. Yes, we’re closing in on the two-month mark of my husband’s retirement from the work-a-day world. I have to be honest, and tell you, it’s actually gone much better than I had hoped it would.

Please don’t judge me too harshly for my reservations. I’d only had past experience to go by. The last few years, my husband had enjoyed three or more weeks off each year, stretching from before Christmas until into the New Year—well, all except for the Christmas of 2016, when that long period of respite was canceled due to unexpected sales. And for those last few years of long weeks off, right after the two-week mark, he started to go stir crazy. Add to that knowledge all the times he’d had vacation time, with no vacation destination…friends, it wasn’t pretty. Three years ago, during one of those three-plus week long Christmas hiatuses, was the year I banished his computer from my office.

It’s hard to get your head into the story when someone is sitting practically beside you, staring at you, watching you to see if maybe you’re bored yet, and would like to go somewhere and do something? Would you? Huh? Huh?

For the first full month of his retirement, my husband focused on resting, and reading, and binge-watching shows on Netflix. He’d informed me before he actually retired that he had no intention of wasting his days by sleeping in. No, he was going to be up by seven-thirty each morning. He’d spend that hour or so I asked of him, doing things around the house, and then he’d apply himself to recreational pursuits.

I bet you’re all wondering how that plan worked out for him? Well, from my point of view, perfectly. In our natural habitats, you see, I’m a morning person, and he is not. I’ve been getting up, for the most part, between seven and seven-thirty since he’s been retired. And I have my house to myself until at least nine on most days, and some days until ten. The only problem with his plan to get up early was that it was predicated on the unspoken natural law that early to rise goes hand-in-hand with early to bed. And by early, I don’t mean early morning. A man going to bed at two-thirty a.m. is sure not getting up at seven.

Over the last week or so, my beloved has finally read enough, and binge watched enough, and surfed the internet enough, and napped enough, was ready to begin what he had decided would be his major focus in his golden years: writing.

He’s working, actually, on his third book. The first one he wrote years before I was ever published, after I challenged him to do so. The challenge came, perhaps not in as friendly a tone as it might have, after he’d spent a few good long minutes lecturing me on all the things I was doing wrong in my process of writing. Yes, my friends, I uttered those words, “if you think it’s that easy, why don’t you write your own damn book?”, never expecting that he actually would take up the challenge.

I can tell you that book had a beginning, a middle, and an end—as did the next one—and that is more than a lot of aspiring authors ever produce.

The fiction sub-genre he’s writing is “dystopian”, and he had a lot of notes before he actually sat down at his computer and began to use the word program for the first time. And as I sit here, writing this, he is in the other room, at his keyboard, working.

He tells me he loves what he’s doing, and that is the most important thing. When the time comes, he’s going to look into “self-publishing” his novel. Neither one of us cares if it makes a penny, though I have a feeling, the way life can sometimes send you a funny little twist, that it might.

For now, he’s happy, and it is in fact bringing us a little closer together. He’s just recently learned one little diddy, an “author’s lament”, if you will. Those of you who are authors know the tune well. It’s called: that moment when you do something, you’re not sure what it was, and several hundred of your hard-crafted words simply disappear from the screen. Forever.

I came when he called me, retrieved his latest saved version, and commiserated with his grief of the unfair vagaries of fate. I told him been there, done that—which is why we have Dropbox.

I also told him: save, save, save.

Love,
Morgan
http://www.morganashbury.com
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury