Thank you, Retired Mountain Man.

These gorgeous flowers make me want to go out and buy fabric in all shades of pink and white and rose and then make a quilt with stitching in the shapes of flower petals just like these.

It’s a good thing I live twenty miles away from a store that might sell something like this.

Let’s talk about deadlines, now that I’m thinking about flowers and fabric and quilting.  Being a writer is a very weird profession.  Unless you are totally and completely in control of every hour of your life, if you are a writer you are going to experience–at least once–the nauseating, stressful, guilty, exhausting feeling of missing a deadline.

I try to be in control.  I set my alarm for five a.m.  I set weekly, daily and even hourly goals.  But you know I folded myself into a seaplane and flew over mountains to eat huckleberry pancakes last week.

I didn’t say, “Oh, thanks for inviting me to soar over Chimney Rock and land on a pristine, isolated lake, but I have to stay home and write.”

Nope, I didn’t say that.  Who in their right mind would?

So today I have spent six hours trying to figure out a particularly nasty little knot of conflict and motivation and character background.  I cannot move forward until it’s clear in my head.  I have filled many sheets of paper and I have kept the Keurig spitting out coffee since five-thirty.  I’ll spend another six or eight hours in order to write the number of pages I need to write today, in order to meet my new deadline, October 1st.

And I will admire my flowers.

Dahlias from Cougar Creek.

(to see some spectacular flower photos, go to Retired Mountain Lady)