It’s a wretched, rainy, cold and windy day.  Sitting in my office at the top of the house, it sounded like the entire terrace would blow down.  All I wanted to do was take a nice long lap.  I decided it would be a good time to take a look at the list of inspirational quotes I’ve been amassing over the years to keep me going in this crazy activity of ours.  So I opened up the folder on my computer where I’ve always kept the document and…it wasn’t there.  I did a Sherlock search, I looked through all the folders I could find, and it’s nowhere.  I love my computer, but I hate it so much, too. Where in cyberspace could it possibly be? I have this vision of an entire universe out there above our heads filled with orphaned bits and bytes, swirling around bumping into each other.  Well, maybe it’s time to reread some of this stuff anyway.  Here’s a list of the books some of these quotes came from.  Maybe you’ll get as much out of them as I have:

1. “Negotiating with the Dead”, Margaret Atwood
2.”The Practice of Writing,” David Lodge
3.”The Gift,” Lewis Hyde
4. “Writing the Australian Crawl,” William Stafford
5.”The Happiness of Getting It Down Right: Letters of Frank O’Connor and William Maxwell”
6. “Happy Alchemy,” Robertson Davies
7. “The Merry Heart,” Robertson Davies
Lots of happy hours of procrastinating there, eh?