(Jul 5, 2012) Friday Writing Essentials: Out of Our Control

Hi, everyone,

First, I'd like to thank all of you for your kind words and support during the past couple of weeks. What a hard time it's been! I really appreciate you and your friendships. Thank you so very much!

I'd like to take a break from life for a while - go on a long vacation to a remote location. Unfortunately, life doesn't exactly let us do that. Either way, I'll just say right now that I'm done with busy/hard/difficult weeks. :-) With my grandpa passing away and my whole entire family being in town (he has 30 grandchildren, most of whom are married and have kids), things have been very overwhelming. I miss my grandpa a great deal. I grew up within half an hour of both sets of grandparents, and spent most of my childhood years and then some with them. And even though my grandpa's passing wasn't a complete surprise, I'm still in shock - especially my emotions. They haven't had much of a chance to figure things out.

On the other hand, my trip to the hospital a couple of weeks ago seems to have *mostly* cured my morning sickness. (Knock on wood!) I only need to take one anti-nausea pill a night, and that lasts me through a large part of the day. Which is really wonderful.

I've discovered other pregnancy related issues, however, including no brain power (literally. Even the smallest of tasks now seem insurmountable! It's pretty discouraging, actually), severe exhaustion, and very strong hunger cramps that make me feel like my body is eating itself. If I don't eat regularly, I still get nauseated, but I think that's part of being pregnant.

For today's prompt, I want (and need) to take a step back from our focus on fiction theme to talk about things in life that are out of our control, but impact us greatly. Not so much a focus on finances or politics, but more the bigger picture things. Like death, famine, disease, accidents, natural disasters, etc.

So, take something "big picture" and write about it. Edit it, post it. Tell me how that event affected you, and how you learned to live with it, move on, accept it, etc. Reading about your experiences will help me with mine.

I mentioned this two weeks ago, but Gather is still not letting me search through posts for specific tags. I'd really appreciate it if you forwarded me links (in a message) to your responses to my prompts from the last few weeks so I can at least read and comment on them. Sadly, I won't be able to feature them. :-( I feel so useless and helpless being unable to even find or read anything. Sigh. Thank you for your patience.

Remember:

You have until Thursday, July 12, 2012 at midnight to write and post, and it can be in any format.

I will read, comment on, and (hopefully) feature your responses a week from today. If I can find them, anyway!

* Have your title say FWE or Friday Writing Essential, and have the initials "OOC" (Out of Our Control) in it.

* Make sure to post to the Writing Essential Group.

* Put FWE or Friday Writing Essentials and the initials "OOC" in your tags. (I won't find your post without these tags.)

And have a wonderful week. I'll be back to my chipper self next Friday, I hope. :-)