Writing progress and golf status quo

     There’s spectacularly little to write about around here unless you’ve been waiting breathlessly for a report of my most recent trip to the grocery store.
(FYI - made it safely through baked goods, caved on the expensive cereal, and was fooled by the beauty of the peaches, which turned out to be cardboard.)

          My back is still a bit sore from my constant celebratory patting of it yesterday. As I plod through the mystery I’ve been writing, I’m approaching third with home plate in sight. A writing conference is coming soon and I need to finish my book if I plan to peddle it to the agents held captive there.

        After completely ignoring it for a month this summer, panic arrived at my door when I realized that writing one paragraph a day wasn’t the most efficient schedule and would only produce a finished work by the year 2017 – if I’m writing a novella – a short novella.  

     Yesterday I made a pot of tea, cracked my knuckles, and cranked out 1,000 words. Attention deficit, begone! I did wander off to do something else but later in the day returned to write a bit more, reshuffle a tad, re-insert some sections that had previously been put aside, and voila! 2,000 more words!

       So, of course, rather than stay home and build on my success, I was out the next day playing golf at 9 a.m. My partner and I are improving, if only at glacial speed. We’re okay with that, though. The par 5 course where we play is just the right size, but it does have some challenges – e.g. the water hazard that’s been consuming my balls with the regularity of a volcanic god devouring virgins. Following that we have a chasm that defeats us every time. Our balls can rocket down the fairways like they’ve been shot from a crossbow, but we can’t get across this gully.

Then there are the hills. Not rolling mounds, but hills. There are at least three holes at which we arrive gasping for breath, the slope so steep that our arms are practically over our heads as we toil upward pushing our hand-propelled carts.

      And so you can imagine we get a bit testy from time to time. 

      Today in the blazing heat, we had just climbed a 90 degree incline at the 5^th flag where, like every other hole, we’d likely chase our balls back and forth as they would sail merrily past the tin cup. I was digging out my pitching club to chip my ball back onto the green (for the third time, since I’d already overshot it twice before). 

       My fellow golfer and her delicately pink ball were at the other edge of the green, some distance away. I watched, amazed, as she lifted her size four golf shoe, made contact with her ball, and kicked it across the green where traveled in a flawlessly straight line over 15 feet and disappeared into the cup with a satisfying thunk.

          I wonder if we’ve been going about this all wrong. . . . .