Even in summer, life goes on. Unless you are a frog.

I feel scattered these days, running one child to music camp and another to dance team practice and reading and writing and revising and synopsizing and attacking school work due on Monday in the middle of fixing meals and carpooling and laundry (will the laundry NEVER stop????) and cleaning hair from the pooch who is shedding like a mad dog in this hundred plus heat.

If I didn't have ADD before, I have it now. I can't concentrate on any one thing long enough to get it accomplished.

This bad for writing. I've read a lot of blogs lately about how writers are struggling with writing. It's the heat. The summer with kids home. The waiting on hearing about queries and submissions. The just plain feeling that their writing is not what it should be.

I just go from blog to blog writing, "YEAH! ME TOO!"

It's more than just activities, though. It's become a fear of opening my project and realizing I have nothing worthwhile to write. I can't write poetically like Marisa de los Santos. (Oh how I wish I could!!) I can't write imaginatively like J.K. Rowling. I can't write break-neck-paced adventures or mysteries or love stories. I find myself comparing myself constantly and coming up short.

And the one thing that makes me put that fear and depression aside is the fact that, at residency, nearly all of the faculty admitted to the same thing. Best-sellers, critically acclaimed and highly awarded authors all feel this way. Well, not all of them, but many of them.

So I just do it. Like Nike says. I just put my butt in the chair and open the document and stop worrying about how good the words are and just write.

I love this quote by Tom Wolfe:

Sometimes, if things are going badly, I will force myself to write a page in half an hour. I find that can be done. I find that what I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I'm feeling inspired.

So stop lollygagging around on my blog and go write.

BUT WAIT!!!

First I'll show you why I'm coming to call my home Marlin Perkin's Wild Kingdom.

In the past two months I have caught, in the house, a lizard, a frog, and six mice. Caught in the door frame of the basement I have found two copperhead snakeskins. One was mostly outside with the head of the skin in the frame. The other was found inside the basement, caught by the tail in the frame. I killed one copperhead hiding by the doghouse, but that was before the snakeskins appeared. I have stepped on too many frogs to count on my way out with the puppy. The cicadas are so loud at night I can't hear my own whistle, and the owls wake me up at three in the morning.

But this beats them all.

Yes, that is a snake eating a frog. And yes, there was much screaming and wailing and panicking about how to save the frog, and then we just settled on the idea that it was the circle of life and the snake needed to eat, and so we stood around taking pictures.

That's just how we roll here in the wild kingdom.