Before the Midnight Snow

Aremarkable thing happened the other night while I was editing my latest book. It has the coolest cover, dangerous at this stage, and the work moves on in fits and jerks. Another Day in Paradise, the title taken from a biker’s shouted greeting on the trail, is supposed to be a collection of my best blog posts from 2010 through 2014. I’ve spent a lot of time getting the formatting right for printing, and what I have so far is looking good. One seeks to monetize the past, and so on. The problem, insofar as there is one, is the content, which is kind of like saying that the problem with shooting yourself in the head is death, not to mention the mess you’ll leave.

After saving a duplicate, I proceeded to toss every chapter that was whiny, wimpy, preachy, or otherwise embarrassing. I tend to suffer a lot, so there was plenty of that. (Suffer, suffer, suffer.) As I worked my way through the file deleting everything best left to an analyst or the trash, the word count started plummeting. This made me suffer even more, which I noted. Duly. But hey, what’s wrong with tossing out the junk? I even thought of other ways to use the good parts, if anything survived the cull.

Considering this led me to a long look back, wherein I realized I’ve been doing things the hard way for my entire adult life. Oh no. Oh, yes! Any area you care to name, across the board. Not hard as in hard labor, but in terms of missing out by walling part of life away. This always involves a limitation or condition: “I can’t do this until I do that first” is popular. Not that these are causally connected, but one must be deserving. This will fuck you up six ways from Sunday if you let it. The “easy way” is everything I ever thought I couldn’t have!

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