I did a bad thing.
This past Saturday was the monthly meeting for one of my local chapters. I was running a bit late thanks to Los Angeles area traffic, and when I arrived ten minutes after the meeting start time, I did something I had never done before: I sat in my car for five minutes just staring out the window, trying to work up the energy to go inside.
It was the first Saturday of NaNoWriMo. My back was killing me from the hour-plus drive in a car that was not my own. It had been a long week at work. And to top it off, it was one of those gorgeous Southern California days when the temperatures are in the high 70s with not a cloud in the sky. Somehow I could not bring myself to walk into a chilly library to attend my meeting.
So I didn’t.
Instead, I took myself off to the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens, not more than ten minutes away. I needed this day. I needed to get away and outside. I needed to get away from voices I hear every day at the Day Job, and the incessant buzz of traffic and noise that is life. I needed to recharge my energy in the sunshine and open air and the smell of the plants and rich, moist soil. In densely populated and drought-ridden California, that itself is a luxury. I worked on my revisions for Seduction in the shade of the pavilion, ice tea and peach sorbet close at hand, and as the afternoon progressed, I made my way down to a part of the gardens I had never visited before — the Lily Ponds.
There’s something soothing about the Lily 
Ponds. Was it the whisper of the breeze through the bamboo? Perhaps it was the burble of the water tumbling from one pond to the other, or the afternoon sun slanting through the trees. Whatever it was, I felt myself calming down, my heartbeat slowed and the tension left my shoulders. Like a great weight had been removed.
In the hustle of Life, balancing an extremely stressful job with the pressures of a Creative Calling, it is very rare to feel at Peace but I felt it here. I sat in the shade, listening to the 
sounds of the garden and the distant laughter of children. I watched the koi swim idly by, and the turtles surface for air. I turned and felt the sun on my face and thought.
I thought about Seduction and what was holding it up. I thought about how after eleven months I finally figured out the opening scene. I thought about how much of what was missing from my book was missing from me. I thought of the tear-jerker bonus scene that’s been floating around my head since before most of the story had been plotted.
And I thought how one afternoon in a garden was enough to set me back to rights. How it was thinking outside that did it, and not thinking outside the box.
But mostly, I thought I need to have a lily pond in one of my books.
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