Switching gears

Enough about the travel guide. Enough about the Good Mood blogger contest. I have no idea where I'm at on that. We'll see.

At any rate, I've been cleaning clutter in my office and ran across my BIKE book proposal. The four-year-old copy was stuffed in a file turned around the other way so I couldn't see it--not until I pulled the file out. Pleased to discover it at this time, I thought I'd share a bit of the sample chapter with you and see what you thought. It never hurts to get input from your readers to see if the writing needs some oomph. So what do you think?

Tentative book title: LESSONS FROM THE SEAT OF MY BIKE

Sample Chapter

My mind was racing in the early morning hours of November 6, 2002, and I did what I always did when the thoughts wouldn't stop. I wrote them down.

Pulling a yellow legal pad of paper out from underneath the coffee table in front of me, I sat down with it in my usual spot--on the left end of our green crushed velvet sectional. Any other time, I would have been sitting there because it was the perfect spot to view both the fireplace and the big screen TV. It would have kept my thoughts away from the pile of dirty dishes in the kitchen sink behind me. And it faced a window where, if the beige blinds were open, I could watch the hummingbirds flit around my next door neighbor's palo verde tree.

In the spring, when that tree bloomed, I'd let my mind absorb the mass of yellow flowers against the contrasting blue sky. I wouldn't think about the carpet of yellow the flowers would leave on my gravel yard. Instead, that tree inspired me to write poetry or compile my to-do lists. I would sit there, looking out the open window, listening to music, and daydream.

But on this day, the blinds were closed; I hadn't opened them since my husband's confession five days earlier. And I didn't have any dirty dishes in the sink; my thoughts were going a million different places, but not anywhere near anything that would have created them. I was surviving on coffee, if I could stomach it.

Seconds after I sat down, my dog Clooney, a black, gray and white schnauzer, jumped up on the couch beside me and stared into my face. It took me a few seconds to notice her increasingly loud growl. She was like a child. If you didn't pay attention to her, she'd whine until you did. Pulling her up onto my lap, she climbed over to the arm of the couch--her favorite spot--and plopped down. She snorted as I adjusted a pillow on my lap. I set the pad on top of it, and with a black Bic pen in my left hand wrote in all-capital letters at the top of the first lined page:

WAR LOG--2002

And then I did what I never do...left the rest of the page blank.

Something else I never did? Write my personal thoughts down on a legal pad. I always used those black and white Mead composition books. But on this day, things were not the same. I didn't even date my journal entry correctly. I flipped the page over and deliberately backdated the second page. My mind was racing--backwards--as I wrote:

October 29, 2002--I am at war with my husband, only I don't know it yet. In a few days, my life is going to take a fall, and I won't even be able to imagine how to get back up. In a few days, I'll discover that he walked into a jewelry store on October 28 and purchased a $150 ring--a gift for a woman who is not me. But I don't know any of this yet. Today, I only know that we went to see my therapist--separately.