Penny4athought's blog

Happiness is a warm keyboard and more than ever…it’s providing my escape from a sad reality. My guiding light, my shinning star, has gone out. The loss of my love, my spouse, my heart has changed the trajectory of my world. He encouraged my writing, championed my efforts and was the daily voice threaded through decades of my life. The love we shared was my muse when I created the hero and heroine of a tale; he was forefront in my thoughts,...

Fall is in the air…but not here in sunny FLA., here it is summer, summer, summer all the time, every day and somedays I feel like I’m trapped in a spin off of ‘Ground Hog Day’. Except for when a hurricane blows through, then it's like an epic disaster movie. I know most people would love this sand and sun lifestyle and most days I do too, but a recent trip back to my home state of New York made me homesick for the seasonal changes I grew up with...

Writers have a need to understand words, to gather them like flowers in a literary garden of colorful, pungent, blooming, budding words. They carefully pick them to tell a story, structure a tale, by placing those words in a way that brings the reader in. Characters light up with specific details and become dimensional. Some writers tell you that characters, once fully formed, can take on a life of their own. When you know your character, you'll...

The air is just that shade of crisp but the sun is out and the day is bright; a perfect day to wake up my senses and my writer’s imagination. I have my coffee poured but it’s far enough away from my little laptop to avoid conflict and my hands are poised over the keys ready to capture that spark of inspiration. My favorite chair is comfy and in close proximity to the open window so I shiver a little when a cool breeze playfully ruffles the...

Seasons change and days speed by; I can not believe it’s 2024. I look at the year on the calendar and I’m flabbergasted and, probably like everyone, wonder when the years had flown by? I can easily remember being about fourteen and sitting on the stoop with friends, sitting on one of our house’s stoops was how we ‘hung out together’, and we were calculating our ages in the year 2000. We laughed hysterically thinking how old we’d be (by teenage...

Today the weather is an unusual temperature for my part of the world. I’m sure it was meant for a cooler clime but I’m not complaining, quite the opposite. The chill morning woke me up with an energetic burst of awareness and as I brewed the morning coffee, I opened the back door to my yard and was captured, stopped in my tracks, a complacent participant. The light wind on my arms and face was much better than a coffee for stimulation. I heard...

It has been awhile since I’ve posted my thoughts here, not for lack of thoughts just lack of time…or fleeing time I should say. Time is constant but not always amenable to my desires. The days are shorter in the midst of January and although my area of the world will not see snow and ice, it is cooler at times and begs at least a sweater if you venture out. For me, winter brings introspective thoughts with the darker, cooler months of the year...

Where have all my imaginative thoughts gone to? I ask myself this as I try to conjure up words...to bring my story back to life...to continue where I’ve left it off and take it through the middle, and on to the ending. It's not often I’m lost for words; in fact, I usually carry too many around and toss them out of my thinking bag a bit over zealously…then I have to comb through the mess of words I’ve tossed about and kick out the useless, over...

Too much time on my hands and not prime time I’m afraid. Recovering from Covid, which I’d managed to avoid getting for nearly two and half years and ticked that it found a chink in my defenses now for it is not a party, far from it. The first days of it, I didn’t know I had it; thought it was a virus, a cold or my general allergies acting up but fast forward a couple of days, and I’m thinking maybe a test might be in order. And then…”voila”...

Stepping away from writing for a day can sometimes extend into an unintended emptiness of words. For someone who has always had stories and thoughts swirling in her head, filling up any given downtime, it was happiness disrupting when my warm keyboard grew cold. After weeks of trying to write, I thought, “Okay that’s it, I‘ve run out of imagination, used it all up…I am no longer a storyteller.” That thought was disheartening because it felt...