With ears in the wind and hope flying, I work on a final, extensive edit of a novel that I have been editing since last year about this same time. That fact just struck me. Picture eyes rolling. How can time pass so fast? But we all know it does.

I began writing the book back in 2016. I remember it was October. It began as play, something a bit irreverent and silly as I tried to keep my sanity during what would turn into the last years of caring for my dear, slowly-declining mother–and as I worked my way through the hard years following my husband’s death and all the demands that came with meeting my life alone.

But then the book began to actually have a shape and a purpose (although I would not see that for some time). I would write determinedly on the book with high hope for weeks, telling myself I would finish in a couple of months. But then life would happen and draw me away, and I would grow exhausted and disheartened, and time would pass before I knew it. Yet, eventually, hope and gumption would flutter past, I would grab them and begin again.

 If you fail once or twice or thirty times, you can get up and try again.

Mel Jolly

My mother used to say, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use making a fool of yourself.” And she would laugh. She had the cutest laugh.

Well, I say there is never any making a fool of yourself with all your trying. I know without a doubt now, from hard experience of years, the truth is that you can begin again, and again, and again. In fact, we do begin again all the time, with each new day and sometimes each new moment. Humans are made that way.

Yesterday I enjoyed a couple of hours working on a 1-sentence summary of my novel.  I had a great time. I came up with this, for now:

“Her husband of thirty-five years has run off and her elderly mother has died, leaving Southern belle Carley Love Wells on her own for the first time in her life.”

And I begin again to edit. A writer is never done with editing.

Blessings,