There is nothing on this earth that will make a normally egotistical human being feel more in touch with the rest of the animal kingdom than to feel the wrath of an unpleasant weather pattern. Cry Global Warming if you must, but when it all boils down, we are just another species of fragile creatures living on a pulsing moving rock ready to bring mayhem upon our heads at any given moment. Our cross to bear is our self-awareness in the face of this inevitable outcome and our complete lack of control to do a damn thing about it.

Oh, but we try. There are entire fields of science dedicated to predicting when the Tera monster will release its planetary bodily functions, but even the most dedicated scientists working in these fields will tell you it’s more art than science. If it were truly otherwise, we wouldn’t be taken by surprise with tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, blizzards, ice storms, forest fires, and so on.

Actually I would say most of the time, weather in any particular area is basically predictable, and that’s the problem. We become complacent in what we consider normal, so when it’s not, we are upset. “How could this happen?” we cry in outrage. “I had plans today.”

The jet stream doesn’t give a rat’s ass about our plans. The shifting tectonic plates aren’t keeping track of our social calendars. The ever circulating “ninos” and “ninas” that take turns rotating the planet and messing up our “average weather patterns” are completely indifferent to our carefully orchestrated lives. They just are.

And that’s OK. Life is a never going to be one hundred percent predictable. We are not omnipotent. However, we are resilient. We stubbornly turn up our collars and take what comes, even if we choose to bitch about it the whole time.

This little gripe is brought to you by the record breaking snow totals we got in the Upper Midwest today. It’s May. Really, I’m not lying. Look at your calendar. Just don’t look out your window. Gripe.

The long awaited journey into Spring is finally coming to an end. April turned out to be the snowiest month of the Winter. As I gaze out my office windows at all the white where brown is suppose to be, I guess the stats are probably right.

You would think all this extra time I would normally spend searching the garden for perennials would have been put to proper use by writing. Alas, you would be mistaken. Sure, there have been bursts here and there of something akin to inspiration; another plot point added to the outline of my overdue book. Beyond that, however, lies resignation and depression. Instead of typing away at my keyboard, I have sullenly hunkered down in front of the television and waited stubbornly for that warm sunny day that’s been hiding just out of reach.

What fates await my neglected characters? Am I bored with them? Have they become passé, mere shadows of their former vibrant selves? I don’t think so. If anything, they’ve become more rounded, fuller. Their relationships are constantly shifting with every new discovery and every harrowing adventure.

Am I bored with place? Hardly. This chunk of real estate that I call home is so ripe with history and culture. Maybe someone with a more sophisticated mindset might not use those two adjectives to describe this odd little neck of the woods. But I think the best history is discussed in whispers of gossip over abundant but weak coffee. As to the culture, it may be course and reserved, but the characters it creates almost always deserve further examination.

So I still have faith that I will write again. That ray of belief and self affirmation will shine on my face and warm me before I know it. A story can seem monotonous and daunting one moment, then suddenly turn on a dime and take me where I wasn’t expecting. Like the weather. Like life.

I equate writing a novel to growing an onion. However, it’s actually more like growing the onion, pealing the layers down, then building them back together again and trying to present the onion as its pristine form, and hope the recipient doesn’t notice the difference.

It’s a necessary but daunting task. If you leave the onion untouched, you don’t know if it’s rotten in the middle or not. You can’t take that chance. So each layer is carefully removed, examined, and either discarded and replaced or left to be worked back into the onion later. Every bad layer must be replaced with a new one, or your onion will have a big hole in it. You can add layers but they must fit with the onion you’ve already grown, or it won’t peal correctly. Well meaning but ill fitting layers of onion can be used to grow new onions later.

I apologize profusely on beating my metaphor into a French-type soup, but hopefully, I made the point. A story is only as strong as its structure.

The way the plot moves along needs to reflect the needs and the goals of the characters experiencing the plot. Subplots need to stand on their own, but they must also support the main plot or they are unnecessary. Your plot must remain interesting and somewhat mysterious to the reader, yet it must make cohesive sense as a whole when the reader is done. The reader needs a reason to finish your story, but they also need a sense of satisfaction at the end, even if it’s some big cliffhanger to continue the story into the next installment.

In my metaphor the originally grown onion is the outline to your story. Don’t’ be afraid to reconstruct your outline. If it’s good to begin with, the basics will hold up to scrutiny. Your creative impulses created the original outline, but creativity is only a vague concept without the work required to make it something worthy of sharing with the world. It’s garnering the gumption to do the work that’s the challenge at least for me. And that’s where I’m at now.

Of course once I hand off my reconstructed onion to my editor (or editors, we’ll see), they’re just gonna peal it back down and make me reconstruct it all over again. I’m quite surprised when all is said and done that the final recipient doesn’t just end up with soup.