Wanna play?
If you’re anything like me, you haven’t left your abode in a while. 197 days, not that I’m counting. Okay, that’s not completely true – I went to the DMV. TWICE. Because I absolutely had to. And I walk the dog several times a day. But that’s it. No daily commute to an office building. No travel. No vacation. No hanging out with friends. No movies. No in-person hockey. No theatre. No concerts. No renn faires. No birthdays. No weddings. No dinners out with my honey. No long weekends at the beach.
197 days is a long time to stay home.
But I haven’t been bored. Stir crazy? HELLS YES. But bored? Nope. I have a stack of books to read and quite a few books in my head desperate to come out and play. I’ve met some pretty spectacular people online. I’ve got Netflix, and HBO, and Disney+, and … let’s just say I’ve got television options.
And I’ve got puzzles.
I liked puzzles as a kid, but it wasn’t until I married Potassium that I learned how to Play Puzzle, which is apparently a full-contact competitive sport. And we both have the bruises to show for it. It’s fun. It’s a great way to pass the time. There’s a sense of accomplishment at the end.
But I filed this blog post under “writing,” not “competitive full contact sports.” Why? Because puzzling is a whole lot like writing.
You start out with all these disparate pieces – ideas, fragments of conversations, impressions of characters, memories, bits of half-forgotten dreams – and it’s your job to fit them all together. If you’re a plotter, you’ve got a map to go by (or the cheater sheet as it’s called in the world of competitive puzzling). If you’re a pantser, you grab a handful of pieces and see what happens. Then you tear it all apart and do it again.
Either way, in the end, you have something beautiful. Something coherent. You started with all these itty-bitty chunks of color and notes scratched out on any available piece of paper, and you end up with something amazing.
I know you’ve been inside for a very long time, but as long as we’re all stuck here for a little while longer, why not pull out a puzzle – or that jumble of notebooks you’ve been jotting down ideas for the Next Big Novel in since you were old enough to hold a pen. Go ahead and puzzle. Write. Create.
I’ll be right here. Puzzling.
Want to share the embedded puzzle? Here’s the link: https://jigex.com/ccGA
