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National Rubber Ducky Day 2024
It’s National Rubber Ducky Day and I’m all in for a lovely bubble bath.
🦆 Duck And Cover 🛀🏻
Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath. ~Michael Caine
That’s about how it is at work lately.
You keep a placid exterior to reassure the customers, but you’re running like a high speed subway under the surface trying to keep up with the madness.
It’s a good problem to have, since it means they’ll keep paying me until I croak.
But not today. Today is Saturday.
It’s time to kick back, relax and enjoy some downtime with Kelly.
Since I’ve finally completed all the steps involved in getting Carol’s Christmas published in paperback on Amazon, kicking back, relaxing and enjoying downtime with Kelly means exactly that.
I’ve had a busy, exhausting week and I’m looking forward to doing effectively nothing. Sure, I have an errand to run and we might even get to play Scrabble, but the point is to do as close to nothing as possible.
Rubber 🦆 Ducky
Sesame Street: Little Richard Sings Rubber Duckie
Part of any good relaxation plan is to enjoy a lovely, soaky bath. Fortunately, I received a number of bathing aids for Christmas.
I got fragrant vanilla epsom salts, cheery orange sugar scrub, an aromatic lavendar bath bomb and a great big brush to wash my back with.
It was a lovely surprise to get these supplies since I had no idea what I even wanted for Christmas.
That was actually pretty weird. I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t want at least one thing specifically for Christmas.
Last year? No earthly idea. Absolutely no specific thing that I wanted.
As I’ve been known to say, “Expect nothing and anything that turns up is a pleasant surprise.” My Christmas haul was a genuinely pleasant surprise.
For that and the love and consideration that went into my stack of gifts, I am extremely grateful.
✍🏻 Writer Without A Pen ⌨️
A writer without a pen would be like a duck without water! ~Donovan
As I mentioned above, Carol’s Christmas is up and ready for sale on Amazon now.
There was a little back and forth, but it’s there at last and I can spend the rest of January in consumer mode.
I’m not writing a darn thing. I’m taking a break to catch up on shows, movies, books or whatever I haven’t afforded myself the last few months.
Every now and then, a thought about The Sentinels comes up. I plunk it back down below the surface in anticipation of it taking root in my subconscious to bear fruit at a later time.
I’ve been watching a lot of writing videos on YouTube to see what they have to say about the craft of writing that I can benefit from.
I’m also sowing that into the mental furrows where better storytelling might soon be growing.
Things that I’ve been hearing a lot about among authortubers are topics such as theme and voice.
I haven’t given this much thought before. It seems like artsy-fartsy stuff that lit professors and book reviewers want to bandy about to seem erudite.
It felt as if that sort of thing actually mattered, it would simply occur as a feature of the writing.
For me, I feel that I need to work on some of the more concrete, surface-level stuff such as descriptions, actions, dialogue and plot.
I know my Holiday Season Serial Romances are very dependent on dialogue. I need to do a better job of painting the picture of Laurel Ridge and Wyoming Pass.
I know what they look like in my head, but I’m not sure I’ve successfully conveyed even a smidgen of what I know about these locales.
That’s something I’ll be focusing on when I work on this year’s story, The Lights of Pine Hollow.
Ryan and Marta got interrupted on their way to see the sights of Laurel Ridge’s neighboring town, so I’m thinking this will be a chance for me to work on a less dialogue-intensive tale.
But not this weekend. It’s time for my ❄️ long Winter‘s nap ❄️, and I just don’t have the mental faculties to do any writing right now.
That’s what I’ve got for you on this chilly mid-January weekend. I hope you’re keeping warm and enjoying your Christmas haul along with the love and consideration that inspired it.