Moraine Lake: Where Ideas Come From

Yesterday I sat and wrote at one of my favorite places in the world (well, when there’s no one else around), the head of Moraine Lake, a stunningly beautiful blue-green glacial lake in a cradle of mountains, where a stream pours down through trees and rocks and bushes, creating little islands that could become their own world in a fantasy story.

This is where story ideas come from, for me. I can sit and write and dream, for far longer than people will let me. It’s strongest right here, but the influence filters down, in the water and on the wind, through the Bow Valley and down to Calgary. I remember that influence best when I reconnect regularly.

Maureen

Finding Solitude

I try to have a routine, to be quiet, deeply quiet, to work in solitude and somehow my life resists.

And it’s resisting in larger and larger ways, like the city being in a state of emergency for two weeks.

I finally figured out what this is doing to me – it’s forcing me to go inward for quiet -–to go deeper and deeper inside, to be quiet in spite of the chaos all around me.

Does that, then, show up in my writing? I couldn’t imagine how it could not, but I don’t really see it, myself. Perhaps some day someone else will be able to show it to me.

Maureen

And now for something completely different:

They’re taking our sidewalk away! Just in case the construction next door wasn’t enough for us, we get more.

I’m used to the hammering and talking and even the beeping, but the house-shaking smack of blocks of concrete dropping is a little harder to ignore.

Maureen