Image courtesy of Google Images

Hot. Temperatures are expected to peak at 110 F.

In southern California we do expect the heat. This area is a desert, although it doesn’t resemble one any more. We have collectively altered the environment with our green lawns, trees, and swimming pools and of course our famous (or perhaps infamous) freeway system.

Image courtesy of Google Images

What we have done (over several generations) is what writers do everyday. Of course, a write doesn’t work with a shovel but rather a pen and paper.

Okay! A computer and word-processing program.

A writer takes her tools and molds her ideas, thoughts, and emotions into a story, an article or a journal. Which ever it is, it is taking what’s there (the voices rolling around in your head, the anger at an injustice, the remembrances of the days activities) and molding those emotions using words into a story.

We, as writers, change the landscape – physically pen to paper, but also by writing we change the landscape of our thoughts and when someone reads what we have written we influence or alter them as well. I mean come on, haven’t you read a book that once you finished you couldn’t get out of your head?

I have.

And sometimes as a writer, we need that intensity of emotion to write – like a hot summer day or even the bleak cold of a winter night to force us to put our ideas on to paper.

So maybe its not so bad it’s projected to 110 F today. Maybe the intense weather will melt out something that has been simmering in the back of my mind . . .

And just maybe, I’ll write a bit more.