The Joy of Writing

Tonight I pulled a Margery. Margery has a great attitude about writing, that it should be fun and you should enjoy it. I realized I was beating myself into frustration-mode, trying so hard to pull pages out of bleeding fingernails on the keyboard. And everything I wrote was just WRONG.

So I decided to pull a Margery and write for myself. I dragged out an old historical and amused myself with it, tweaking the first three chapters. It wasn’t half bad, really. But more importantly, I was having fun. I realized that, even though it’s important to be disciplined, your creativity can’t be beaten down and shoved into a box. All you end up with are useless pages. By the same token, you can’t just write whenever the spirit moves you :bath:, or you’ll never end up with a book. I think it takes balance. And I’ll bet tomorrow, my creative muse will be back in action, after the mental break.

Your daily historical trivia: Victorian women’s ideas of parlor amusements weren’t what we might consider typical entertainment. Instead of playing cards or games, they did science experiments. Really. This is an excerpt from Godey’s Ladies Book, 1855:

“Violet-colored metal: Melt together equal parts of copper and antimony, the one a yellow, the other a white metal and the color that results from this mixture will take the color of a violet. ”

And just where did they keep random bits of copper and antimony, I’d like to know!