Seeking Tomato Recipes

    Looks all innocent, doesn't it? Just a few little tomato plants. A friend raises heirloom tomatoes from seeds each year and she gave me these last weekend. I accepted because I love growing things and I love tomatoes and I especially love growing tomatoes because I live in an area where they thrive, so it's easy.
    Unfortunately, I already had put in four plants and my friend gave me 9 more. Now, I'm not sure if you know how many tomatoes one plant can produce, but it's a lot. A whole lot. So much more than two people could ever consume in a summer.
    One of the plants is a Strawberry Oxheart, which apparently produces tomatoes that weigh 2 pounds. Two pounds! I have no idea what to do with a tomato of that size, but I'll figure out something. I did give a few of the plants away, but I still have 9 tomato plants in my garden. That's way too many. This is very likely to turn into a cooking blog devoted to recipes for tomatoes in about 75 days.
    Oh, and here's a lovely iris. Spring is so pretty.
    Writing? Yes, I have been. In fact, I'm going to fire up the spreadsheet and report for May very soon.

And Thus Does Fortune's Wheel Turn Treacherously*

   So, May has flown right by. A frightening thought. Fortunately, I seem to be getting over the story paralysis that kept me from writing in March and April. Unfortunately, work is keeping me busy enough that finding time to get the words out and onto the page has been a challenge.
   Yes, yes, we all have excuses. I know that if I want to write, I will find the time. Or make the time.

   For instance, this woman made time in the early morning and she works as a lawyer. Good for her. I am inspired to follow in her footsteps. This morning I wrote about 750 words before work. They were good words, too, I think. The scene haunted me last night when I was trying to sleep. I realized that I just wasn't torturing my heroine enough. Instead of sleeping, which I sorely needed to do, I thought about ways to make the poor woman's life miserable.
   Illness? Eh, no one wants to read about a bilious protagonist. Loss of a loved one? Not really necessary to advance the story. Plus, I like my supporting characters too much to kill any of them off (for now). Financial? That's it. She's losing her job. That's in addition to having broken up with a longtime boyfriend, having to compete with her arch rival on a huge career-making assignment, and stumbling into some clues that make her suspect an innocent man is being framed.
   And I think there are yet more anvils waiting to fall on our girl.

* Geoffey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, The Monk's Tale.

Resolutions — April Update

    So, March was rather a bust on the writing front. April wasn’t much better. In the last month, I wrote 4,124 words. This is not great. I mean, it’s better than April 2011, when I wrote 424 words. But it's not where I want to be with my goals.
    This brings me to 51,444 words written this year, which is an improvement over where I was last year at this time (18,594 words). So this is encouraging. Also encouraging is that I did focus on the one main WIP that I really want to finish. I finally decided to skip the scenes that I was having trouble writing and get to the more exciting part. I still have to go back to fill in those gaps, but I have a pretty good outline for them. And frankly, if I’m this bored writing them, why would anyone want to read them? Maybe it’s time to figure out a different approach to getting that information to the reader because the initial scenes don’t seem to be working.
    I only wrote nine days last month, far from my goal of writing something every day. Last month, I wrote eight days, so a tiny bit of improvement there. My best day was today, with 1,036 words.
    For next month, my goals are to focus on writing every day, no matter how little. I do notice that the daily interaction with the story keeps my creativity flowing. Unfortunately, I have a work commitment that's going to eat up almost two weeks and it's not going to be easy to find time to work on my personal projects. However, I have noticed that when I have the least amount of time to work on my WIPs, that's when inspiration strikes. Maybe this time, when I'm swamped at work and stressed out, I'll figure out a way to rework those troublesome scenes.