So much to write, so little time

Ah...the weekend.

After another hectic work week- 50 plus hours each in my case - it's my pleasure to sit down in front of my trusty HP and let my mind drift off into other projects.

I try for a chapter a week, two if the dark corners of the Elsewhere are really speaking to me. Sometimes, sadly, life gets in the way and, busy with other projects, I get nothing.

I spent most of this morning working on a new website for a friend who also happens to be my editor. It's a quid pro quo arrangement. I'm building her a new, improved website. I'm kind of handy that way and to be honest, her old website was created sometime in the 1990's. An old dinosaur if I've ever seen one! She gets a fresh looking site to hawk her wares on and 'Of a Darker Heart' gets some much needed editing. I'm presently about a third of the way through that little gem. I'm hoping, in the end, it will righteously scares the bejesus out of anyone who dares open the cover, though I'll take a 'queasy in the guts' reaction just the same.

"It's okay," I tell myself, "I have time to finish all those storylines rattling around in there like the last few peas in a tin can."

But do I?

I've been thinking of mortality of late.

My characters tend to drop like flies without warning, as most of us in the real world do. Who gets up in the morning thinking "I've just kissed my wife and kids for the last time," "I've just watched my last episode of 'The Walking Dead' and am never going to find out how Rick dispatches Negan," or, "Did I just drive the last mile I'll ever drive?"

Who thinks like that? Someone suffering depression? Someone who just narrowly avoided death, maybe because some other motorist was texting while driving and nearly caused a head on collision? Or maybe just a writer with an overactive imagination?

Whatever the cause, the thought of my own possible impending doom has loomed large in my mind of late. It doesn't interfere with my writing...not mine. In fact, it lends great ideas for my style of writing which happens to include a lot of death and destruction, the more twisted the better. But it does add a certain urgency to the creative process. Makes me more determined to get the plethora of stories my mind insists on telling me out of my mind and onto the page before they're lost forever among a mass of degrading and yes, rotting neurons inside the head of a corpse, perhaps torturing me in whatever reality exists beyond this one.

Dark thoughts, indeed.

Which, perhaps unavoidably, lead to darker thoughts.

How will it happen? Will it be painful and messy? Will a 1,000 pound pallet of dog treats fall from an overhead rack and render my 190 lb. frame into Browder pate'? Will one of those thoughtless and idiotic drives who can't put their phone down for the fifteen minutes it takes to drive from Great Bend to Ellinwood not see me in time? Not hear my horn before they realize they've crossed the double yellow line? Or will I, like many in my family including my mother, simply drop like a rock. Gone before I hit the floor from a heart attack because I absolutely, stupidly, love to smoke; enjoying each hit from a cigarette as a connoisseur enjoys each and every sip of a fine wine despite my previous heart problems and frequent bouts with COPD.

Which shall it be?

I call it Death Roulette. And we're all lined up at the wheel, our bet laid for us at birth, with no other choice than to go about our daily routines while we wait for that little silver ball to fall on our number, red or black, and signal our passage out of this world and into the next with much fanfare. Or without.

But then I shrug it off. And, given I have the time, get back to what really matters: The story at hand. Will Ellinbrooke be destroyed by an unimaginable evil or will my heroes prevail?... Will Roo be taken by the Infernal (for more on Roo, see my last post) or will he survive? And just why does he see his dead mother every night?... Who is Nobody? And why does he travel the states helping those who aren't even aware they need it?...

I could go on, or I could just write the stories and you can read the answers later.

If there is time.

There's so much to do.