MY Hero | Sherrie Lord

MY Hero

Apr / 11 / 2009
I should fashion a new hero, one with blonde hair, green eyes, and a mind for solving problems. No, wait. I already have a hero like that, in the flesh.
❧

Not A Poser

Husband Harry and I towed our motorcycles to southern Utah then rode them the last hundred miles to Las Vegas the first week in April. The attraction, besides warmer weather? A Moody Blues concert. He's not the fan, I am, but he'll go along for the ride — literally.

We got back home on Sunday, tired but smiling. Tuesday we learned son Mike’s cancer is back.

We thought we’d won this battle when Mike had surgery to remove his cancerous thyroid in the Fall of 2007. Apparently some thyroid cells escaped both the surgery and the chemo therapy. Any thyroid cells remaining are also cancer cells, and these have migrated to the lymph nodes in his neck. He’s scheduled to have those removed in a few weeks. It's a long surgery and pretty involved, but they tell us he should make a full recovery and be cancer-free.

So, you have some highs, you have some lows.

But some days I just want to give up.

Thursday (April 9) was like that. Worried about Mike, sick of my own chronic illness, weary of the physical pain that accompanies it, and frustrated with the fatigue that keeps me from accomplishing even a fraction of the things I used to do in a day.

Every room in the house has boxes stacked in the corner, evidence of decorating and organizing projects I had to abandon. Books in the family room, drop cloths and cans of paint in Harry’s office, clothes to sort through in the bedroom, and material in my office that I need to sew into curtains.

Then there’s the book! Since this little edit has turned into a full-blown revision, I decided this might be a good time for me to learn how to outline my stories. This one took me weeks; I finally finished on Tuesday — yeh, the day we learned about Mike’s cancer.

Wednesday? Lost in a haze of shock.

So I tried to work on Thursday, taking this new outline to where I left off in the manuscript, like about half way through. Except now I have new scenes and plot threads I need to weave into the first few chapters. I couldn't even figure out where to wade into the mess.

Then husband Harry came home from work. Husband Harry to the rescue!

It must have been the expression on my face (it couldn’t have been my little tantrum) that showed him I was pretty frustrated. But first he took me out to dinner. Then, from across the table, my favorite project manager said, “It sounds like you’re stuck. Is there some way I can help?”

Boy, can you!

The server hadn’t even brought our salads, and I was scurrying out to the car for my notebook, the binder that contains my outline, character bios, the story’s calendar/timeline, the scene I'm working on, and blank paper. Between bites, I walked Harry through the kinks in the plot, all of which involved trying to line up critical scenes, the advancing romance, and each character's emotional growth into a whacky work schedule. That is, both the hero and heroine work shift work. My hero’s days off fit a pattern but he rotates back and forth between workng nights and days. My heroine works the same hours every day, but her days off are different each week. And I’m supposed to find the time for them to fall in love, fight, break up, then get back together again.

It takes a calendar. But I married a brilliant man. He listened while I explained how this had to happen then that had to happen. He asked all the right questions. And he offered little secrets about how my hero would feel about this or react to that.

By the time our steaks arrived, we had the characters’ work schedules and the plot’s timeline in perfect agreement. In other words, we messed up their lives, then we put them back together again.

I’m unstuck; NOW, I can get back to work.

As for the house projects, Harry came to the rescue regarding that on Friday. He’s not only a good plotter of Christian romance novels, he’s a good vacuumer, mopper, and building materials shopper. Later today, he’ll be a good bookshelf-hanger-upper, solving the problem of all those boxes of books in the family room.

He’s a project manager at work; he must be a good one.

And I should fashion a new hero onto the pages of one of my books, one with blonde hair, green eyes, and a mind for solving problems. No, wait. I already have a hero like that, in the flesh. I am such a lucky girl.

Hugs, Sherrie ;-}

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