CJ Carmichael: When your city floods—and other capricious twists of fate...

I have a new book out this month—Promise From A Cowboy, the third in my Coffee Creek Montana series from Harlequin American. 

I have several novellas and one mystery that I should be writing and revising.

And I have a closet that still has more winter coats than summer sandals.

But I’ve been distracted. What kind of crazy world is it when you can be hiking in beautiful mountains on one day and then two weeks later, pummeled by torrential rains that leave your city streets looking like this? 

We live on a hill so we’ve been spared from the flood hitting Calgary Alberta this week. But it’s hard to think of the next plot twist in your novel when your friends and neighbors are being evacuated from their homes. It’s difficult to write even one sentence when you know those people will have to throw away  photo albums, treasured books, carpets, and ruined appliances, because they’ve been saturated by contaminated river water. And that they’ll be rebuilding their homes for months or possibly years.

The flooding is getting a lot of news coverage these days. Meanwhile tragedies on a micro level have not stopped.   A friend was let go from her job. A blogger I follow lost her young husband to liver cancer. (http://toquegirls.com/dr-spencer-r-mclean-frcsc/) Another  friend’s mother passed away a month ago.

At times it can all seem too much. But we cope. And one of the ways I cope is by reading. Escaping into a well written romance novel is to be reassured that the world can be a beautiful place. That people can be good and that love is also a powerful force of nature.

I think maybe this week, I’ll give up the effort to write. Instead I’ll make some sandwiches for some hard working folks. I’ll help out a few people where I can. And then, at the end of the day, I believe I’ll read a romance novel...