RedHotRomance

I was heading upstairs around nine this morning to write my Sunday blog entry when my husband waylaid me in the living room and asked me to go for a hike with him. Now, you have to realize I’m normally one of those terribly organized individuals who plans an entire day before crawling out of bed. Today was scheduled with blogging first, then stuffing envelopes for my promotional mailing for Wolf Tales (read Nyree’s blog entry and you’ll know what all that entails!) before sitting down to work on my character studies for my next book. Instead, when Doug suggested a hike, I looked at the sun shining on the brilliant yellow and green oak leaves just outside our front window and suffered what can only be called a severe lapse in self-discipline. I threw my plans out the window, put on some old jeans and my hiking boots and met my husband at Bogg’s Forest, a beautiful 3500 acre "demonstration forest" just down the road from our house. Doug was on his mountain bike and I took off on foot. Within minutes, we were following a rocky trail through stands of oak and ponderosa pine, the occasional old growth douglas fir, and dogwood beginning to shift from green to scarlet. The air was still morning fresh and smelled of bay leaf and pine, and you could hear the sound of a spring fed creek rushing alongside the trail. At first I felt guilty, out walking with no destination in mind, and then I realized it was all part of the process. In order to write, we need to fill our minds with sensations, but we also need to fill our souls. Just two hours of following trails through the woods left me feeling exhilarated and fresh, ready to sit down and write with an entirely fresh repertoire of descriptive phrases. Now when my Chanku race through the forest, they'll leap over fallen manzanita, smell the pungent scent of bay, lap water from spring-fed creeks tumbling over slick basalt worn from years of erosion. Two hours wandering without purpose has essentially strengthened my sense of the world around me. Knowing it’s part of a process that strengthens my writing as well, is an added reward for spending the morning playing hooky.