Greetings Kind Reader...

Oh. My. God! I know you're probably thinking 'You mean she's not dead?'

And no... I'm not. I have, however, actually been really quite busy.

I know you're going 'Really? Have you been so busy you couldn't find a little time to carve out a few minutes here and there to write a blog post?;

Short Answer - Yes

Long Answer - Okay, I could have found time. BUT I truly have been busy. And yes, I've been busy writing. I've done a lot of writing. Just not blog writing because believe it or not - I have to be in the right frame of mind to write a blog post. However, as I've spent hours upon hours every single day writing and editing (then rewriting and re-editing) various short stories as well as a couple of novels, I've found that whenever I do have time that I could write for WASWR - I have a great deal of difficulty shifting gears from working with a clear cut outline into a mode where I'm somewhat freethinking.

And I don't like it when that happens. To be honest - 9 times out of 10 when I'm 'freethinking' here at WASWR, the words that make their way into a blog post are actually scripted from beginning to end via some sort of outline because I utterly loathe rambling that goes on willy nilly with little regard for actually saying 'anything'.

I believe every word must have meaning otherwise why write it down? That's something my father taught me long ago when I was a child. I suppose it helped my future writing career that he, too, was a writer - a poet - and an editor. And when I say editor, I don't mean he was a guy who sat around circling words in red for people to 'fix'. I mean he was a newspaper editor.

Yes, he did mark errors in stories only he never used a red pencil or pen. He used a blue 'markup' pencil as that's what editors used when he was a kid (FYI - my father was born in 1918) and later when he worked on the Stars and Stripes Newspaper in Baltimore during World War II. Yes, that's right WWII. He was in charge of  making sure every word of every article was clear and concise because he loathed wasting valuable space with 'fluff'.

(Incidentally, he was also in the Korean War - desk job - again with the S&S - and later he worked as an envoy for the UN to Lebanon because he could speak French and some Farsi and he proved valuable in the 'translating' department. Of course, when your father speaks French fluently and then you take French in High School - your French teacher begins to greatly dislike you because my dad was always correcting what she taught me. But that's an entire post in an of itself.)

As I was saying, my father taught me that when I write I must have a clear beginning, middle, and end. I suppose that is why most all of my 'rambling' stories aren't rambling in the sense that they're all over the place. Rather they're designed to take readers on a trip from here to there with occasional stops along the way as 'reading pit stops' much the way that we would stop on our many family outings in any one of our family's land yachts all of which were dubbed the USS Williams.

Just like my family and I would take those little treks down the often untraveled paths of most other tourists - my wordy tangents, which sometimes seem as though they take on a life of their own - always have a way of putting a reader right back where they're supposed to be in one of my 'rambling' stories once the tangent is done.

Don't believe me? I dare you to go back through any of my posts and find a story with tangents that don't bring you back to the story. Why do I feel confident that you won't find any? (And no, I did not go through and delete those posts) It's because every word I write - even when I've gone off on those tangents - has a purpose. Hence the long tagline to this blog site: When a Southern Woman Rambles... It isn't rambling. Each word has meaning, every raised eyebrow and pursed lip has a purpose, and all those smiles tell a story.

With that in mind - over the past few months when it would cross my over worked mind to think 'I really should write a post for WASWR'  my brain refused to let go of what I'd been writing about prior to what I thought I wanted to write about here. Therefore, I couldn't do it.

As in, I flat out could not come up with anything worthwhile to say. What's more, I couldn't come up with stories to tell because this spot has almost always been my spot for telling bonafide tales plucked out of my mind based on things I have personally experienced as either the 'doer' of the action OR as the silent watcher. Because  I truly do enjoy recounting stories of people being people when they think nobody's watching.

Oh, and do I ever watch, too. And every so often someone will do something so over-the-top stupid (again, when they think nobody's watching them being over-the-top stupid) that sticks out in my head as being something worth sharing with the world using my more often than not sarcastic and wholly southern writing of style.

Only with so many shorts and novels swimming around in my head over the past few months, it simply wasn't happening. If I had to pinpoint an exact moment when my mind erected a brick wall to keep my ramblings out of the picture, I would have to say it was November 1 when I found myself involved in another NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) session wherein I wrote an entire novel in 30 days. From outline to 'The End' in 30 days - which is NOT easy.

And since the end of November I've been honing that novel, cleaning it, and making it something I can be proud of. What's more, after writing and editing that novel, I've jumped back into editing book #1 of my Teen Fantasy Novel series Alden: Rise of the Eilimintals.

Likewise, I've edited my extended short 'Harlan Dairy Road' (which, I've been told would make a great 'Hallmark' movie - if - I can get it into screenplay format... screenplays are NOT in my writing wheelhouse).

Further, I've been cleaning Fly Home, Earli Byrd because as God is my witness, I am going to submit it for query. (I'm nervous about doing that - funny, I know - considering I query books on behalf of other authors all the time. Only it's their books... not mine. That 'mine' aspect changes everything)

Oh, and I've been working a few novels that might... SHOCK you because they're erotica novels. And on that note: I don't really like the term 'erotica' because that makes them sound kinky and somehow 'dirty'. I prefer the term 'romantica' because at their core are stories of romance. Stories that, if you were to remove the sex, have actual plots to them. I just take the sex from 'innuendo' to 'descriptive'. But I do not... not... NOT  write 'porn'. No.

By the way, the women who've read some of my work have had nothing but compliments about it which makes me quite happy. Yes, that's right women. Because let's face it, men, for the most part, aren't as into the romantic side of the 'erotica' genre as women are. So I write it for them (and yes, I do write it for those men who are out there in the world who do enjoy the romantic side of 'erotica')

And I figure if EL James author of 50 Shades of Gray can take an absolutely impossible concept of a billionaire Dominant coming across a virgin and hoping she'll decide 'Hey, sure, I'll become a submissive' only to fall in love with her and give up a lifestyle he is deeply immersed in over a three book series that is now one movie into a three movie deal - I can write an actual story women (and men) can relate to that makes sense and is highly sexual without being kinky.

(By the way, I did read the 50 Shades series to see what all the hype was about and hated it. Honestly, it hurt my head to read it. It was riddled with editing errors to the point that I had to remind myself that I wasn't supposed to be editing it. And, as I mentioned, the plot is wholly improbable.

What's more - the story, I feel is a total ripoff of the 2002 movie The Secretary with James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal

But the one thing that drove me utterly bonkers was the fact that James used the damn word 'hitch/ed' - to denote how characters would have a 'catch' in their breathing - so damn much I found myself thinking if only I had a shot glass and some vodka, it would make one hell of a good drinking game to throw one back for every friggin' time I read the word. Needless to say, I was NOT impressed. But hey, she made oodles of money and she probably doesn't really care what one rambling woman in Texas has to say about her inability to pick up a damned thesaurus -- or to use the one built into her word program -- to find a different word than hitch!)

As you can tell, I've had a lot on my mind. Blogging simply hasn't been one of those things. No, that's not true - I mentioned it did cross my mind occasionally. It just didn't cross it enough to do anything about it until today...

So why today?

Because I came across a blog written by someone who mentioned in one of their posts that the average blog lasts about 5 years and I thought to myself 'does this mean my WASWR site is fading away from me?'

No. It doesn't. Perhaps that blogger has been reading the wrong sites because I've been blogging here since April 30, 2009 and today's date is February 17, 2016. That's OVER 5 years. What's more, one of my blogging buddies, Glen Staples, has been blogging since May of 2009 at (http://www.glenslife.com/) He's a great guy based in England. He was even part of the international blogging group I started called Real Bloggers United. And another blogging friend of mine, Pierre LeRoux-DuPisani, (http://gaywarfare.blogspot.com/) who is based in South Africa has been blogging since January of 2009.

We are three bloggers who have defied the odds of blogging according to the statistic that I read on the site of the blogger who made the comment and I want to keep defying those odds. I want to blog here at WASWR 8, 12, 15 years... I want to be the one who laughs in the face of the statistic.

And that Kind Reader is why I decided TODAY was the perfect day to post something here. But don't get all wound up and excited - it doesn't mean I'll be here blogging like a loon. It's truly something I can only do when I have the time.

So keep your eyes open for the NEXT post - which I hope will be in a few weeks (I'm giving myself a good spread of time!)

Until then, be good to one another. And that's all I've got until next time!