Tuesday, November 28, 2017

November, what a month!



Welcome friends,

The month of November is all but over. It was a good month for my wife and I. It was a month filled with travel, good food and writing, lots and lots of writing, and some sadness, and much joy. My wife and I have been looking forward to this month for close to two years. We bought our trailer in April of 2015 and soon after getting used to hauling, backing, cleaning and all of the other details of trailering we decided that we needed to make a big trip. So we made plans to travel to Arizona on our annual pilgrimage to see her mother and other relatives.

It took a year and half to build up the confidence and money to make the trip. Our original planes were to spend a month in an RV park near the town of Benson Arizona. Her mother lived in the small community of Pomerene Arizona. The reservations were made and we began to gear ourselves up for the trip which was never to happen. Shortly after we made the reservations my mother in law passed away. It was sudden and tragic and we all had a difficult time with it. After her death our plans were shelved. We even decided that we were not going to Arizona at all because it would be too painful.

Time has a way of dulling the pain of tragic events. A few months after her mother died we felt as though a trip to Arizona would be healing and would give us a certain amount of closure. But we changed locations. My wife is the best when it comes to doing research on RV Parks and came up with a park near the town of Camp Verde. It is called Zane Gray RV Park. We booked it from the middle of October to the middle of November. The only downer to the trip was that my son and daughter in law where having their third baby, and we would not be there to witness his birth. Yes, we knew that he was a boy and his name was already picked out. Daxon Cort Mansfield was to be born sometime in the middle of November. We promised to be back as soon as we could and give all of the attention we could when we returned.

The day finaly arrived and at 0600 we headed out to Camp Verde Arizona, excited and nervous, but ready to travel. We broke the trip into halves. The first half was from Escalon to Barstow where we stayed at a KOA near the Calico Mine and Hinkley the town Erin Brockovich put on the map. We pulled into the KOA at around 3:00pm and it was in the high 90’s. The evening was uneventful and we pulled out the next morning at 0600 on the second half of the journey. Arriving at the Zane Gray RV Park around 3:00 pm we backed into space 92 and gave each other a high five.

Our time was cut short because Daxon was in a breech position and Jill was scheduled to have a C-section on the 7th of November. Though our plans were changed we still were elated to have made the journey and was able to spend time with family. Mark and Denise, Gregg and Linda, Mike and Kim and Darlene and Ron, thank you all for making our trip very special. We were sad that we could not see Kitty, Sheila’s mom but felt like we could dedicate the trip to her. She was a wonderful women and will be missed.

So that is the trip, the sadness, the food, and the Joy the writing started on November 1st via Nanowrimo. No that is not a foreign language. It stands for the national Novel Writing Month. Google it if you have never heard of it. If you have ever wanted to write a book, it is a good thing to get started in. This is the fourth year I have taken part in it. The goal is to write fifty thousand words in thirty days. This will get you on the way to creating a book. It is a sobering lesson to learn that even though you write thousands of words and create a story there will not be a book until you have done hours and hours of editing. I have admitted in another article on this blog that I do not like editing, it is the hardest part of writing. It is also the most important part of writing.

Today is the 28th of November and I just wrote 50,217 words and completed the task. I still have another ten thousand or so before I have an ending, but I think I will give it a rest. I have another novel that I postponed for Nanowrimo and I will pick it up and finish it this next month. I hope to post excerpts of the book in the next few months. Well that was my November in a nut shell, and I wrote way to much as my wife is quick to add. But hey it is what it is.

God Bless and keep writing

 

Cliff

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