The Race -- On Writing

Today is R in the 2016 A to Z Blogging Challenge. The 20th letter in the alphabet. Eight more letters. Nine more days. It's getting hard to sit down at the keyboard. To think of a topic or title that's appropriate. Maybe if I blogged about cooking. Or astronomy. Or rivers.

But I write about writing -- the mechanics of the craft, research (ah, that would have been good for today), book reviews with a nod to the author's style, bits of flash fiction and flash nonfiction, or excerpts from my book Murder on Ceres.

I read about bloggers planning ahead, deciding on a theme for the Challenge. Maybe even getting a few pieces written and ready to go. If you know me at all, you know I'm not that organized or that mindful.

That is not to say that I wait 'for the muse to strike' before I write. I had in mind a piece of flash fiction for today, but the story was like Topsy, Peter Rabbit's sister, it just grew and grew. Until it wasn't finished for today.

Inspiration for stories comes from everywhere. The Race comes from my exercise teacher's story about her grandmother's arranged marriage jammed together with an NPR story on this year's Paris-Roubaix.

Begun in 1896, Paris-Roubaix, sometimes called 'The Hell of the North,' is a one-day, 161 miles plus professional bicycle race. What makes The Race unique is the cobbles. Normal, fairly smooth road racing gives way to extended patches of cobbles -- old, loaf-sized paving stones that are anything but smooth.

The concept of smooth sailing giving way to bone-jarring, treacherous cobble stretches, is the storied path of true love and, in my story, the path of a marriage.

The moral of this blog post might be "be careful what you say around a writer, it may end up in print." Or "don't plan a project that's too big for the time or space allotted."