First, a confession, it’s taken me 3 months-okay 5 months, maybe 6 months-to write this blog post. I’ve been fighting it ever since the concept of Hana-Yori-Dango (Dumplings over flowers) ran out of Alanea Alder’s book, jumped over my writer’s block and crashed into my frantic attempts to ignore the plot holes in my latest work-in-progress.

This Japanese concept urges us to choose things that are practical (Dumplings – Dango) over things that are a fleeting pleasure (Flowers-Hana).

Bringing this into the worlds of my book is proving to be hard, bringing it into my life is harder.

I’ve been thinking of Siann’s issue with this. She thinks Y’keta is an idiot. She calls him a ‘shellhead’ and believes that he doesn’t know anything that could be useful. Or does she? Is she just looking past a dumpling just in case a flower shows up?

Am I looking past the obvious story that books one and two in the Sky Road have set up just hoping that something shiny will pop up and make writing easy again?  

How many times have I chased a flower, something ephemeral, that I knew I couldn’t keep, and gone right past the things that I knew I needed? It’s an unfortunate fact that I often don’t want things that feed me. I choose things that are the emotional equivalent of cotton candy and then wonder why I come away with a sugar headache and an empty heart. You’d think all the ‘bad boys’ in my misspent youth would have taught me this.

What will it take, Sandra, to feed your soul, your story, instead of the never ending need to dodge, game, read, and play, my way out of progress and into the never ending chase for one more flower.