Barbara Ann has been wanting to learn to crochet for quite
some time now. She’s been begging for a
couple of years and I’ve been putting her off, repeatedly. I just haven’t had time to teach her. At one point this past summer, my Mother
taught her how to do the chain stitch, but wasn’t able to get much further than
that. “Once we’re settled in,” I had
said “I will teach her. I have loads of
yarn and plenty crochet needles if I ever find them all” and I had meant
it. As Barbara Ann has been asking
lately, it’s been the same old tired excuse.
“Once the house is clean and your room is clean, then we can pull out
the yarn,” I had told her on more than one occasion.
Yesterday, we cleaned house.
We finally had a free day, and I was motivated, and… I found a way to
motivate Barbara Ann, kind of. First,
since the Halloween costume she believes she must have costs a whopping $50.00
(which includes the wig that has to be bought separately) I figured she was
going to have to earn that one. No clean
room, no costume. Next came the T.V.
restrictions during the week, and then this past Thursday at the Boys and Girls
club where she goes after her UIL practices, someone taught her the crochet
single stitch. Yep, I capitalized on
that one. I also had resorted to giving
her ADHD medication to her on the weekend.
The results were a clean (enough) room.
Then of course she held me up to my bargain with the crochet.
So last night and tonight, in front of the T.V., Barbara and
I were crocheting. As I was diving into
the blanket that has set aside for years that I had started for Miss B, my
fingers enjoyed the activity and my mind started brooding about the upcoming
NaNoWriMo. ‘I should be plotting and
planning,’ I was thinking to myself. As
I contemplated putting the yarn away and hitting some writer spreadsheets for
character building and such my mind started wandering away again (as it tends
to like to) and some ideas were percolating in my mind. I toyed with some things I would like to do
with my upcoming novel, contemplated how to implement them, and even started
considering some written but unrevised works of the past.
Tonight as I continued to crochet, my mind did some more
swimming. Ideas were popping up and
puttering out, some thoughts on how I can do things were trying to grab hold,
and I had nearly put the yarn up to write this blog, looked at the blank Word
page and put the computer up and continued crocheting with my daughter. More thoughts trickled in and out, and I
contemplated the cover contest for NaNoWriMo I had read about earlier. Then it hit me, like a baseball bat to the head. This is just what my novel needs, time to
percolate, and I continued to crochet with my daughter as I let my brain do its
thing. It’ll come, that great novel
waiting to be dreamed up and written, it’s building itself in my subconscious
and I need to respect that about my writing process. I have ten more days to percolate before
NaNoWriMo begins, and at the rate I’m percolating, I’m sure I’ll have my start ready
to go on November 1st.
So, I’m getting ready to head back to the internet to post
this to my blog and then check out that cover contest. I can feel the power of the NaNo kicking
in. Just ten short days to go, and it’ll
be time to type that first word of my next novel. I can hardly wait.
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