Oh, is it October already?

Here you think you are writing a blog that nobody really pays much attention to, and then a couple of weeks go by without entering anything–okay, THREE weeks go by–and friends start to phone the house and say, “Are you all right?”

I’m all right. If you must know, I’ve been writing my novel, which means that I am mostly reading my horoscope, playing games of Spider Solitaire, staring at the computer screen, getting up and doing posture-aligning exercises and, of course, when all that fails to bring about numbers of pages, I set about to improve the feng shui of the house.

Anyone knows you can’t write a novel without some good feng shui.

Which brings me to the painted tree in our garage.

According to a book I read, apparently we have THE worst feng shui situation known to humankind. Our bedroom is located just over our garage. (I’ll give you a moment to think pitying thoughts about us.)

This book says that this particular floor plan causes all the energy, creativity and cash to leak out through the floorboards of our bedroom (which just happens to be the house’s “money corner” as well) and out through the garage door. This explains so much about the past fourteen years.

But, the book says, there is a remedy, and it doesn’t involve moving vans or bricking up the garage and parking the car on the street. Apparently you can counteract the ill effects of bedroom-over-garage by having a tree in your garage–or, if you can’t manage to grow a massive plant in your garage, due perhaps to the fact that that’s where your car lives, and also there is no known sunlight, you are allowed to paint one.

I resisted this for a while. I may be crazy, but I am not a sucker. But then–well, I handed in my book proposal, and I realized I really did need some good luck, and if painting a little tree was going to help that along, then why not get on with it?

So one day I went downstairs with some brown and gray acrylic tubes and painted me a tree. I’m not going to say I didn’t feel a little foolish doing it. The garage wall, with its garden hoses, rakes and snow shovels hanging on it, looked a bit strange with this brown, straggly thing painted there between them. I wasn’t sure if the feng shui gods were going to give me points off for not having the talent to do a really great-looking tree. For good measure, I tacked up some pine branches. I intuitively felt that pine sap and money might have some relationship with each other.

The book proposal was accepted.

Then the other day we needed an electrician to come to the house. Naturally he had to deal with the circuit breaker, which just happens to be located in the branches of my tree. We stood and stared at it together.

“Nice,” he said at last. “One of the kids do this for you?”

I could have said yes, kids did this. You know how they are. I could have said it was a terrible painting accident that somehow involved pine branches. I could have even claimed it was here when we moved in and that I keep meaning to repaint the entire garage. But I didn’t.

“This,” I heard myself say, “this is how I’m going to write my novel. It’s my creativity right here. Flows right up the trunk here to the money corner of the house, actually.”

Electricians have heard everything. He just nodded.

And then, while he worked on the circuit, I went upstairs and wrote and wrote and wrote.