Word-Fuel Weekly 08/22/2021

Fill up on this week’s Word-Fuel.
Under Healthy Eats, Sweets & Treats, a new oatmeal recipe featuring peaches, maple syrup, and ginger. In Do.It.Your.Self-care, a relaxing bath salts recipe formulated specially to evoke feelings of peace and tranquility while giving the user glowing, supple skin. Check out The Book Nook for a glowing review of the historical fiction novel Sin Eater by Megan Campisi. And stop by The Writing Corner to find out whether YOU are a gardener or an architect. Not familiar with that terminology? Read on to learn more.

Start your day right with my Peach, Maple, and Ginger Oatmeal. It’s packed full of nutrients, fit to fuel your mind&body for hours after you eat.
A single peach has two grams of fiber, one gram of protein, and it’s packed with antioxidants. Plus, just one of these beauties gives you 6% of your daily vitamin A intake and a whopping 15% of vitamin C.
But it doesn’t stop there! Oats are one of the most nutrient-dense food sources we can consume, boasting tons of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidant plant compounds. Not to mention, they contain more protein than most whole grains.
Even maple syrup has health benefits, provided you use REAL, NATURAL maple syrup. Due to the high content of polyphenol antioxidants, consuming maple syrups reduces inflammation in the body. That means it can reduce oxidative stress on the cells, fighting all sorts of health-related conditions over time.

Covet an hour of alone time after a long, exhausting day? Have trouble relaxing at night or unwinding once you’re finished with work?
If so, I have a gift for you: a recipe for my handmade Vanilla Citrus Bath Salts.
Soak in alluring vanilla, punchy grapefruit, and tantalizing sweet orange essential oils, then let all your worries wash away.
Vanilla essential oil brings about an increase in feel-good hormones whenever you smell it, which in turn relieves tension and calms the mind, helping you fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer. Additionally, it promotes respiratory health by allowing you to breathe more deeply with each inhalation. Now that’s Va-nill-ah.
Both Grapefruit and Sweet Orange essential oils are well known for their skin healing properties, touting uses, from healing the acne-prone to balancing oily pores, moisturizing dry skin, and leaving aging skin youthful and glowing.
Not to mention their usefulness in combating depression, lethargy, nervous exhaustion, tension, and insomnia, uplifting your mood with a single sniff!

This past week after recoiling in horror at another one of my tossed aside outlines, I began to take stock of abandoned projects. In doing so, I realized: not ONCE have I stuck to a pre-proposed story structure. Images of many pointless hours spent brainstorming, writing, rewriting, and reimagining raced through my mind. And what did I have to show for it? Nothing, nada, zilch, zip. The only full-length novel I’ve managed to complete in the last year was the one where I had no outline; my first ever novel. It got me thinking: maybe I’ve been doing things wrong this whole time, going against my natural inclinations in favor of forced structure when I should be allowing the story to unfold as it should.
That’s how I discovered I’m a Gardener, NOT an Architect.
Gardeners are writers who don’t know what they’re going to create until they start and are only vaguely aware of the direction they want to go in, preferring to allow the story to tell itself.
Architects are the polar opposite, with an all-encompassing organized way of handling things. They often plan every aspect of their story from setting to plot and even the characters, writing down every last detail until there’s no guesswork left.

Three signs that YOU are a gardener too:

The prospect of coming up with an outline leaves you in a state of stress, misery, and anxiety.
When you go to outline, does it feel akin to a chore? Like washing a sink full of dishes? If so, you might be a gardener.

Whenever you have written an outline, you don’t stick to it.
Did you spend hours crafting the perfect plot points only to have them all fall by the wayside when you finally go to write your story? Or do you decide you don’t like the arc you designed for your protagonist?
If this sounds like you, you’re probably a gardener.

Does my story above sound familiar to you? Have you spent time developing an outline only to abandon the project altogether afterward? Have you only finished novels you didn’t outline?
If that’s the case, you are 100% a gardener.

Thanks for filling up on this week’s dose of Word-Fuel.
Check back next week for more Healthy Eats, Sweets & Treats, Do.It.Yourself-Care, Book Nook Reviews, and words from The Writing Corner.
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