Marilyn's Musings

I once asked a fledgling novelist if he would serve as a judge for one of the fiction categories in a competition. He fixed me with a sad puppy dog look and said, “I’ll be working on my next novel then, and I’m afraid that would distract me.” Writers tend to live in the world of the novel they’re working on and let the story dominate their lives. On the other hand, we live in the real world, and life happens. If life always distracted us from writing, precious few would ever finish a work. I thought he should buckle up. I had written almost 40,000 words in the still-untitled second Shady Grove Mystery, featuring Susan Hogan and taking up where The Perfect Coed left off, when life hit me with a biggie. After recovering from a break in my right leg, my left hip bothered me more and more until walking was almost impossible. An x-ray showed a fractured hip so bad that nurses said, “We’ve never seen a hip that bad,” and I wondered if I should say thank you. I resolved to write on—surg...