Click to visit other participants

Q… oh, yeah. That’s right. There are some really weird letters coming up, aren’t there? X… Y… Great.

I thought about a lot of things for this post. Can I make a whole post out of Quaker Oats? Or maybe cheating. There are some languages with plenty of Q-words. Of course, I don’t speak any of them, and I’d probably still wind up with a word that means blue jay, or alphabetization. And it looks like plenty of people are writing about their queries, but… Uhm. No.

Quiet, though, has always been important to me. I might be more myself alone in a quiet room than anywhere else. I can think in quiet, create in quiet… I can revise in quiet.

I like to work on my own things at lunch. And usually, it’s a little difficult to get people to understand that. For me, it can be a little difficult to get back to work, once somebody’s gotten going. But on those days when I get a little quiet, I can make real progress. Or, you know, read, or watch something on my phone, or just… disconnect.

You don’t know how much you value quiet until someone sits down next to you and starts talking about nothing. Making small talk. “So, you’re not finished with your homework?” Homework, of course, would be the novel I’m writing, or the latest installment for my blog. “What’s it about?” Right now, my grand total for know them from real-life people showing up on my blog is ZERO, by the way.

I had a bad week for talkers, last week. Didn’t get much done at all. One of them did ask what my book was about, and when I said that it was about aliens from outer space, he started talking about a movie he’d seen in his wanton youth. Yup. Porn. (and btw, he has not read my WIP.) No self-censoring mechanism on that one. And once he started talking, he had no idea how to dig himself back out of the your-WIP-reminds-me-of-porn hole.

One of the talkers is a writer, too. One of the friendliest, most upbeat people I know. Always encouraging. Always. Whether you wanted encouragement, or not. She’ll interrupt her own project to chat with you.

I can never get enough quiet.