In beginning...

 

This is a new blog for me. In a way, it is being born of extreme frustration. And in other ways, it is a labor of love. I think I am coming to understand the “love/hate” relationship that people often discuss. Read on!

Frustration, along with exhilaration, filters through the air like the ever present dust particles. No matter which way I turn, they are there, filling my space with specks of ideas that dance in the stream of sunlight that seeks my office window. There are notes written on scraps of paper everywhere on my desk, sometimes on the floor. A pile for the current project, a pile for future projects, a work pile… all these tiny scraps of paper filled with ideas, thoughts, characters, places, anything pertinent to writing… whatever it is I am writing. Which can be anything and everything: blogs, work, the nearly completed manuscript, the new manuscript, the memoir, e-mail, newspaper columns, Facebook… words, they are everywhere, becoming entangled and sometimes misappropriated in my zeal to use them. I steal… ideas, comments, brainstorms, notions, mental images, sentiments, opinions… all are ripe fodder to be written down and added to a pile for future use.

I recently read a book that said I should share a little bit of the process of writing with my audience daily. I wouldn’t presume to bore you daily, but perhaps you might find it interesting to see how the process works occasionally. “Document my progress”, the article said. Even when there doesn’t seem to be a process or progress, things are happening. My mind is continually picking up tidbits of information from everything around me. Nothing goes unused.

My process began years ago when I began writing those all encompassing, dreaded Christmas letters because I was too lazy to actually hand write a greeting. But surprisingly people seemed to enjoy my rambling anecdotes. From there I participated in a writer’s class via the pony express, learned enough to publish a few articles and stories, and progressed to a novel when I retired. Retirement didn’t go as planned; no sitting in the sun, traveling to far away places, none of that good stuff. Retirement brought out my entrepreneurship. So three businesses later, I decided to write a novel. It seemed like a fun challenge at the time. (Little did I know.) I wrote, put it away for months, sometimes years, brought it out again until I was at a point where I thought (the key word being thought) I had a finished product. I gave it to a friend to read. Her dog ate the first few pages and it was handed back unread. It was discouraging to say the least. So I printed it off (a whole ream of paper), tucked it away and literally moved. Re-retired in a new area, I decided to dust it off and see if I could really do something with this dream. I looked into many writer’s groups in the area, selected a few to participate in, and just when things were looking up, Covid hit. Now you might think that would have been an ideal time to work on a manuscript uninterrupted. Or not. We do nothing in a vacuum. Oh, I could write the words alright, but what did I do then? I needed help, encouragement, expertise, even a kind word, to proceed forward. Finding trust within a group of strangers can be difficult… and scary. My first challenge.

And then, then I had had to “unlearn” all of those rules of English that I learned a hundred years ago. Where you use a comma or not, how to use an ellipses, semi-colon, even the spaces at the end of a sentence; it has all changed. Have people nothing better to do than re-do perfectly good rules? Another challenge.

Writing is like being in labor. I am so ready for this book to be published, but I am still laboring! But at some point, it will happen. And so I enter a world of which I know nothing. Publishing. It is akin to being shot off the earth in a rocket and struggling to figure out how to survive in an alien land. If I make this decision will it hurt or help? How do I know which choice to make? How do I move forward? It’s a kin feeling your way across a mine field in the dark. I have no idea if my next step will be safe or literally blow up. Call it what your want, I feel like “challenge” is fast becoming a four letter word.

So as I attempt to float this boat, feel free to comment. If you know of anyone “suffering” the malady of an unpublished work, please share on you Facebook page. Rather than suffering in silence, we can learn together!

Just a Work in Progress…