Valentine Lake

I just realized it’s been a month since my last post.  Between travel and home life things have been quite busy.  I’ve also started working on a new novel and I’m very excited about it, so I thought I’d share with you the place I worked on it this past weekend…

There is possibly only one place in the world I prefer to write more than in my rocking chair.  That place is sitting on the settee at Valentine Lake.  The settee is in a small alcove off the living room of a friend’s cottage.  The alcove has two large windows with one overlooking the private lake and the other overlooking the woods.  There’s a small table to set my tea and notepad on and an electrical outlet nearby to plug in my laptop.  It’s close enough to the fireplace so that on cool mornings I’m warm and on warm days the windows give a nice cross breeze.  It’s my little piece of heaven on earth.

My best friend from childhood and I live several hours away from each other so we don’t see one another as much as we’d like to, but every summer we make it to Valentine Lake.  The cottage is owned by the mother of one of my other best friends who’s no longer with us (that’s a story for another time) and we’ve been going there for nineteen years (Wow! that feels like a long time when I say it out loud).

Over the years our lives have obviously changed, we’ve grown up, gotten married, had kids, but the cottage has remained constant.  Our husbands laugh at us because BFF and I spend several hours just sitting together while I write (before I started writing I did word finds or Sudoku) in the settee and she reads in the overstuffed rocking chair next to me.  When the weekend is over my hubby always asks me what BFF and I talked about and every year I tell him the same thing, ‘not much’.  He wonders why we don’t ‘interact’ while we’re together, but between the phone, texting, email, Face Book, and even Skype, BFF and I actually communicate quite a lot.  Enough that when we’re together at the lake it’s nice just to sit quietly and enjoy the lake and enjoy the fact that we’re there together after all these years.

Now that I’m home in my rocking chair and well rested from a relaxing weekend, I have lots of energy to keep the words flowing and I even have a few new ideas.  So I’ll leave you for now so that I can get some of those ideas down…but first I have to call BFF and tell her what 4yo said to me this morning.

Happy Writing!