If You Have the Perfect Writing Nook, Don't You Just HAVE to Write?

The best thing about my new cottage - the very best thing about my very sweet new cottage - is the little room tucked under the eaves on the upper level, which David has designated as my writing nook.

You approach it up a narrow circular staircase.

And then there it is: a small, snug, cozy room with a loveseat (and I love to write while sitting sideways on a loveseat), and a chair for David if he comes to visit me, and a little table tucked under a window, and a bookcase made decades ago by my father filled with the books I love best with my beloved hourglass perched in the place of honor on top. 

There is even a little sink where I can get water to heat up for tea in my Wedgewood teapot. David just ordered for me the New York Times recommended best water-heating device, and it arrived yesterday.

The nook opens out onto a rooftop deck.

From the deck you can get a view of Boulder's iconic mountains, the Flatirons (the ones that are featured on all the postcards). Here they are!

I have had many pleasant writing spaces in my long life as a writer, but never one as irresistible as this, and one given to me, all to me, by someone who loves me and is rooting with all his might for me to thrive and flourish as a writer.

The only problem is that I haven't been writing this year, recovering from my sequential double fractures (first left elbow, then right arm) and feeling generally discouraged about myself as a writer, given the many changes in the world of publishing in recent years, many of which seem to be leaving me behind (which is fine, it really is, or sort of is, or just has to be). 

But with a writing nook like this, how can I NOT write? 

I just HAVE to write in a nook like this. 

Don't I?

Welcome to My New Fairyland

We moved! My sweetheart and I said our farewells to Rainbow's End, the mountain paradise where we lived so happily for the past two years. It was time to live somewhere in town, closer to public transportation and with fewer (than 34!) steps to shovel in the winter. So we found ourselves a hundred-year-old cottage on quiet Bluff Street in the Whittier neighborhood of Boulder, which has oodles of whimsy and bursts of joy on every block.

First, the cottage itself! Isn't it sweet?

Here are photos from this morning's short walk of exploration. 

A hollow tree welcomes strangers. 

A community fairy garden invites all to linger and play.

Generosity abounds!

A pocket park is hidden up a secret path of steep steps.

And just around the corner:

As I ponder the second half of 2024 and what it will bring, and where my future journey as a writer will take me, it's hard not to think this creative, generative energy is bound to rub off on me. Maybe my next book will feature fairies, elves, and gnomes . . . and ripe cherries for the picking . . . and free seeds for the planting ... and a secret park . . .   

Who knows?!

The First Day of the Second Half of 2024

I haven't written a blog post since early March. 

I haven't written much of anything since early March.

My life has been pretty much on hold since I had a SECOND fall (this time on black ice) and a SECOND fracture (this time a "proximal fracture of the right humerus" - terminology I had never heard of until this unfortunate event) on March 21, almost three months to the day after tripping over an exuberant grandchild and breaking my left elbow. Luckily, I could just switch the cast on my Vermont Teddy Bear from one arm to another.

For what seemed like forever, I couldn't write with a pen (my favorite activity on this earth) or type (my second favorite activity on this earth) or dress myself or use a can opener or scoop out hard-frozen ice cream or drive or . . . or . . . or . . . anything at all, really.

Long famed for cheery resilience in the face of trauma and tragedy, I have to confess I just gave up. I moped. I whimpered, whined, and wailed. I sulked, sniffled, and sobbed. 

I still loved my sweetheart, and he still loved me, but he now had excruciating and incapacitating sciatica pain. At least we had complementary disabilities and could offer compensatory services, he with two functional arms, me with ease in bending and stooping. But it wasn't exactly a season of great joy. Nor did having to shovel the 34 steps into our house after a series of spring snowstorms (one dumped twenty inches of heavy, wet, white stuff) appreciably increase our daily quotient of rapture. 

I published a book but wished it had gotten more effusive reviews. I abandoned the plans I had made (which I probably wouldn't have carried out anyway) to figure out how to promote it on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. Why bother? What bother about anything?

Bowing to age and infirmity, my sweetheart and I decided it was time to leave our little lovers' paradise in the mountains for the ease of living in town, and we managed to find a sweet hundred-year-old cottage to which we will be moving next week. It's the right thing to do, but oh, it's hard to leave this place we have loved so much. Will we ever be that happy anywhere else? Will we ever be that happy ever again?

The first half of 2024 has been HARD!!!

But today is the first day of the month. For decades I had the practice of starting a new life on the first day of each month. And it's also the first day of the second half of this challenging year. So it's time to start an EXTRA-new new life, right? A complete restart? A chance to salvage 2024? A chance to salvage everything?

Wish me luck!