Wind and Writing - Or Should That Be Switched?

Happy International Women's Day. The wind awakened me this morning in two different ways - one by howling like a small child who's been allowed to run in circles and screech for hours. Ick! Two, because my phone is set to allow priority notifications only while I'm sleeping, and at 2:30 am I got a Wind Advisory Notice from my weather watching station. Why should I care since it's only March? March around here is the beginning of tornado season and a strong wind on trash day could mean toppled trash cans. I'll have to put my two cans together today, instead of my usual separate on each side of the driveway, and I'll have to keep an eye on things as best I can during a very busy run-around day.

What a marvelous image. I love the whole composition. It's
just about the way I'll be feeling today as we enter our
second day of high winds. They should die down around noon, though. 

It was a struggle, but I finally managed to post my Finrod tale onto B2MeM yesterday. I did the research to get the timeline and characters nailed, and started to write yesterday morning. And I wrote, and I wrote, and it was AWFUL. It was boring and there was no life. It was turning into a historical recitation, not anything I would want to read or put out there. So I worked on the sales floor for a while and thought about my direction.

DH is miffed because I wouldn't allow him to help me with
my poem. Years ago I allowed him to co-write a story
with me. NEVER AGAIN. 

In the mid-afternoon I sat down at the laptop and started again - this time with a loosely structured rhythmic poem. I pulled one together and printed it out, then started revising. OH-the amount of red ink! (Well, actually black ink, but you know what I mean.) The structure remained, the instances remained, but the words - oh, those changed a lot.

Writing a poem - so many ways to drive myself crazy. I've
written some good ones in my past. I don't put this one
into that category, but it will work for the challenge. 

By the time I got home, I was ready to revise on-screen again, so pulled it up and plugged in all of my changes, then began once more. I posted it last night as "An Oath Fulfilled, A Life Well Lived". Am I happy with the piece? I'm OK with it. I could easily put a month into a poem like this and still want more time. But it was at a point where I was willing to let it go and move on to the next prompt.

Short stories vs a novel is similar to an iceberg with just a small
portion visible above water. But, in the case of B2MeM, the iceberg
is a mountain in front of us because it already exists. We're just
planting new trees and digging new mines into the existing peak. 

Isn't that what B2MeM teaches us? We look at a prompt, tailor something to meet the criteria, release it into the vast world, and begin the process once again. It's the total opposite of NaNoWriMo where you build something with a 50,000 minimum word count. In B2MeM, you aren't dealing with word count unless you've made it a part of your personal goal. It's all about precision under pressure. Maybe that's why I love it so much when the prompts and format click for me. The moderators nailed it this time. I'm having a blast!

Happy Wednesday to all. I didn't blow away yesterday, so I'm probably fine today too, but my hair will be knots from top to bottom if I don't keep it braided or wear a hat. Be back at you tomorrow.