It's officially SPRING, and that means softball, soccer, trail running, and long walks in the park, and bike riding, and flowers blooming, and no more scarfs and gloves and....

Wait. It's still 33-degrees outside. I thought Spring was here? What gives Mother Nature?

**crickets**

While a delayed spring means delayed soccer season for my son and his travel team and solid snow still blocking my driveway, the change in weather, or non-change, has no effect on my writing. I still procrastinate, except now I have more daylight hours when doing so.

But I do have a few milestones since my last post in February, so here we go!

The pain struck her abdomen, as it did every morning for the past five years, with unrelenting might. Olivia pressed her pillow down on her stomach and breathed in deeply. Twenty breaths were the norm, and then the pain would dissipate, but today it was stubborn. Twenty-six breaths, twenty-seven breaths...

After forty breaths, Olivia was finally able to sit up. The wooden floors of her hundred-year-old house creaked with agony as she walked down a flight of stairs to the kitchen. A red robe too long for her short frame draped along the floor, and her slippers created a sound like sandpaper upon each step. She snapped her fingers the instant she reaches the refrigerator -- the doctor said no food today. Water was going to be her breakfast regardless how much her stomach growled.

The long-forgotten clattering noise of little girls getting ready for school suddenly filled Olivia's ears. She smiled as she recalled all the times she ran late, forgot lunches, and failed to signed various school forms, and other parenting mishaps. Being a widowed young mother to two independent girls wasn't easy, but they all survived grade school, and then high school, and then college.

The phone rang, and the bustling sounds faded along with her recollection. Olivia dragged her feet to the phone at the opposite end of the kitchen, sandpapering the white tile floor along the way. As she picked up the phone, she checked her cactus plants for new growth.

Time for a post for the IWSG blog hop, hosted by Alex Cavanaugh, where writers talk about their insecurities in writing, publishing, and other related topics.

I am in no short supply of insecurities when it comes to my writing career. As to my actual writing . . . sometimes I hate it, but when I love it, I truly love it.

This isn't bragging by any means -- I am my harshest critique. I've delete parts of stories, some up to 20k words, because they sucked big time. Even those nights where I would wake up from an incredible dream and spend the next 2-3 hours writing 3,000 words of a best-selling story, only to wake up the next morning to read ramblings of an insomniac trying to sow incompatible plots into an ice-cream hamburger salad quilt. 

Yeah... I meant to write that to show how out-of-whack those stories can be. Delete. Delete. Delete. We writers give the delete button real purpose.