Tenacity and Stippled Ceilings

January. The month of new beginnings. Nothing new here. My planned book is not coming out, I’m not going on any exotic travels, and there are no weddings or grandchildren in my family's future.

What’s a writer to do for fun? Besides writing and reading? How about scraping stipple? Yeah. Deep breath. I figured January was a great month to finally scrape the decades-old bubbles off my living room area. And you know what? It feels good.

I actually think this will help my writing. All those dust bunnies clinging to the mini-stalactites have got to go. It’s kind of like editing out adverbs or my favorite over-used words like just, then or so. My ceiling is going to look so good—visitors will come over and be awestruck by the beauty of it all.

Actually, a smooth, clean ceiling gets about as much attention as a neatly edited manuscript. It’s only the errors that get noticed.

This stipple-scraping is a messy job. Speaking of messy . . . nobody said that getting published was easy and I’m not ready to give up. I figure, if I can scrape stipple off ceilings, doesn’t that qualify as tenacity? And isn’t tenacity a prime requirement of writing success? See? This isn’t just a home reno project, this is a writing exercise.


To all of you authors, grandparents and travelers . . . congratulations. I’m happy for you. As for me, I’m kind of proud of my new ceiling. Happy 2018 to everyone, whatever your definition of happy might be.  For me, right now it’s tenacity.

2 comments:

Lori said...

Lovely! I play the same mind game called "Grit and a Clean Kitchen" almost daily.
And as you say, the invisible work is usually not acknowledged, unless a flaw is detected.

Larry Verstraete said...

Like you said, no one notices perfection, just the flaws. Sound advice for writers and other creative types. Keep at it. Great ideas surface when the mind is elsewhere.

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