A father, not mine, dying at 2 a.m., his children surround his hospital bed and he makes it through the night. At work I am tired and hungry, fasting bloodwork for an afternoon appointment where I’m admonished for letting my inhaler prescription lapse as she observes my shallow breathing. Go to the pharmacy now, exclaims my doctor. There is no parking and I pull on the curb illegally to run in for the quick errand but the line is deep and I worry about a parking ticket as the clock ticks. But a ticket does not await me – instead a flat tire – punctured by the curb and my hasty parking. I fret about being away from work so long and yearn for my waiting bed. I pull around the corner of the busy street and call the boyfriend whose father kept us up into the early morning but he cannot help me, too busy with work where he is self employed. I can do this. Our 8th grade gym/science/health teacher taught us and I find the jack nested, but unmoveable and I go to the glove compartment for the manual and as I’m passing by a sewer grate my heavy keys slip and glide cleanly through the slat.
Category: Writing
Table For One
I never realized just how social eating out is until it was just me.
Alone.
On my own.
Other diners came in pairs and threes and more.
I sat among them, conversations floating
… a woman venting
… a man joking
… a son listening to his elderly mom
Did it feel like I was with everyone or no one?
I was with myself.
Alone.
On my own.
MC
Beyond blogging
I’ve been at blogging for nearly 4 years now and as I mentioned at the end of my thirty days of blogging in September, I’m considering a need to do something else. These days I’m spending more and more time reflecting on what the future holds for my writing. To be honest I am full on fearful to do anything more than this. I will be a complete failure at trying to write a full blown book. It’s too scary. I’m not creative enough. I’m too old.
Today has been cancelled
This is my 30th blog post of the month. It was a challenge I put to myself to get my creative juices flowing again and I would say it worked pretty well. I found I looked forward to writing each day and words were flowing better than usual. The results were a nice lift in stats and followers but now I’m questioning everything.
It all began while digging into my stats, particularly the search terms that got people to my site. And then it occurred to me I have never tried Googling my site to see how it comes up in the result. Maybe that was a mistake or maybe it was a sign to take a step back and reconsider what I’m doing here. What am I doing here?
So what happened is I saw the title of this intriguing item just two results above the one for my blog and being an inquisitive person, I clicked.
The author listed out several reasons why not to have a personal blog and the first one is it’s a time waster. Personally, I don’t think working on my blog for the past three years has been a waste of time because I was writing, something I have been drawn to do for many, many years. But maybe I’m at the what’s next phase. Do I want to keep writing a blog about my life which admittedly tends to get boring? Should I find a niche and write about something I’m passionate about? Should I give up blogging altogether and start writing something I can hopefully one day publish?
I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. I’m also feeling the beginnings of a cold or something and my body just wants to go back to bed and cancel today. I have appointments (of course) but the urge is strong to reschedule them. While I’ve been blogging a lot, I have not been reading as much and I’m missing that too. My bed and a book might be my date for today.
MC
A Writer’s Beginning
One thing I learned many years ago in my very first college writing class: do not begin every sentence with the word I. In fact, try to start as many sentences as possible without starting with I. This is something that despite everything else I must have learned in college, always stays with me when I am writing. The essays and stories I wrote in that class in 1987 are still boarders in the basement of my home. They have lived in a Rubbermaid bin for over 25 years and have moved with me from apartment to apartment. And there were a lot of apartments.
Dressing for creativity
You hear time and again that we are what we eat. Literally, physically. But are we also what we wear? How we dress and present ourselves to ourselves and the world? For me, if I go a number of days wearing only yoga clothes, I start feeling not so good about myself, mentally. Like, what is wrong with you girl, get yourself dressed like you care!
The energy of ideas
Yesterday I had a bunch of ideas about topics to blog about. I didn’t write them down and they have vanished, vaporized, gone. Does that happen to you? You’re in a groove, ideas are flowing and you’re sure you’ll NEVER forget them? So noted.
On the tail of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Instagram post about writing I thought I’d pull out her 2015 book about creativity called Big Magic. I listened to the audiobook when it first came out and loved it so much I decided to pick up the hard cover edition to add to my writing inspiration library. She describes the magic of ideas: how they come to you and how they disappear if you don’t act on them. She illustrates it with an example from her life about a book idea she worked on until her personal life got in the way of her project and how she’d lost the passion for it when she tried to return to it. Poof, it had disappeared.
She talks about how ideas are energy and they are looking for a human to bring them to life but you have to be open to receiving them. And if you don’t take up this particular project, it will move on to someone else. Have you ever had an idea and saw it pop up somewhere else? Someone else brought your idea to life? This happened with that particular book project. Someone else wrote the book.
This got my attention. I decided I better start paying attention to my ideas. Write them down. Be open and see where they go.
MC
Liz Gilbert Writing Inspiration
Perusing through Instagram I was stopped short by the photo above. Sometimes I berate myself for scrolling through social media when I could be doing other, more useful things. But how would I stumble upon gems like this? I was instantly intrigued. Elizabeth Gilbert has the secret knowledge of how to be a successful writer (and in ten easy steps!). Success and ease are not guaranteed but she does share some ideas that work.
- Tell your story to 1 person using your own voice.
- Start at the beginng and tell the whole story.
- Use simple sentences.
- Don’t worry if it’s good, just finish.
- Don’t write to change anyone’s life.
- Tell stories instead of explaining stuff.
- It doesn’t have to be a particular length or geared to a specific audience.
- You have been doing research your whole life just by existing- use it.
- Day after day, keep going.
- Be willing to let it be easy.
I’ve chopped her advice into tiny nuggets here so if you want to read it in her own words, take a meander over to Instagram. She’s a voice I find inspirational to follow.
MC
Just keep writing
For a moment I got sucked into the vortex of blog stats. How many people are reading this? How many visitors did I have last month? This year? Look at how many more I had last year. Gosh. Why did I even look at these stats? Why do I care? How can people read what I’m not writing? Write for yourself whispers my soul.
I’m not going to lie. It isn’t easy to stick to writing, especially when the inspiration isn’t there. I see how much I wrote last year, particularly February when I committed to blogging every day for that month. I had stats! I had likes and follows. I’m not going to lie. It felt easy and good. This year I’ve been adrift and honestly (why do I think I have to keep prefacing myself about honesty!) when I lost my job, I lost my mojo, even though it had been steadily seeping away for some time.
Taking Action
You may have noticed I haven’t been writing. You may not even miss me but I miss you. Who is you? An anonymous reader? Me? The me who was writing for me. Does that make sense? When you want to write but you don’t and then day after day goes by and the more you don’t write, the less you write. I’ve picked up books on writing. I’ve done some exercises. But mostly I just haven’t been writing. Something finally sparked inside and said, “you have to write!”.
Most recently I picked up a small book I read (75% if you go by the bookmark tucked into the latter part of the book) during a writing course from a couple of years ago called The Memoir Project by a local writer, Marion Roach Smith. I had time between lacrosse games over the weekend so I thought I’d pick up where I left off but then since it’s been so long since I’d picked it up, I decided to start over. One of the very first things she recommends against is to do the writing exercises! She wants you to dive right in.
Maybe that’s the push I need to get me in front of my computer today. To open my blog pages and start writing. I decided I needed to give the desk a good clean since the only person using the computer as of late is my twelve-year-old who is usually eating snacks and putting fingerprints on the screen. It’s time to wrest control of the computer from him! Then, in cleaning the keyboard, I accidentally flipped the monitor orientation sideways (Ctrl/Alt and the arrow keys will fix that in case you ever need to know).
I Am Writing 