i finally started one

I finally started a short story yesterday. I've been telling myself for the past several days that I want to try doing short stories for a while. It's amazing how much a change can set you on edge and make you want to procrastinate. Yesterday, I chose to sit down and write a while first thing. That tends to work well for me when I am letting writer's block kick me around. If I don't conquer the writing, I don't get to get to the other stuff on my to-do list that I want to do. I am essentially bribing my inner child - if you write a while, then you can do the other stuff you had plotted today. And it's not that I don't want to to write so much as I get myself worked up about it and how I want to do it perfectly. I forget that I have to get a draft down before I can fiddle with it and revise it into what I want it to be. So I sat down and brainstormed a while first - throwing down some ideas and toying with them until one struck me. Then I scribbled about that one for a while, and wrote out a rough draft longhand. When I finished it, I typed it up and brought it to the writer's club meeting at the local library. There were good suggestions about ways to improve it, but also a lot of compliments. That was reassuring. I think I want to keep going with writing short stories, maybe write a collection of them or something like that. I don't know. If nothing else, I feel like I am exercising my writing muscles by practicing more planning and structure as I write. That will help me when I do feel like it is time to go back to the novel. This kind of feels like I am making my writing rather like the patchwork afghan I am making. I am knitting eighty squares that are ten by twelve inches, then I am going to crochet them together into a queen-sized afghan. I work on it little by little when i have the time. It isn't as intimidating to knit a square as it is to knit a whole blanket, and it fits better in the time I have available. So I am going to practice my writing skills in smaller blocks for now and see what I can come up with. After I finish writing this post, I am going to go back and do the revisions I decided on in the writer's club meeting yesterday, and maybe I will start planning and plotting out another short story. It will be fun! =)

change in direction

After talking to J some, I am thinking about changing directions as far as my writing endeavors go. I am thinking I will leave the novel on the back burner for a little while and try my hand at writing some short stories. The main thing I struggle with when I am working on the novel is keeping everything straight in my head as far as the personalities of the characters and the main points of the story line go. I tend to go off on tangents and fill stuff in as best I can when I don't remember for sure. So now I am thinking it might work better to build my strength up a bit before I try to attempt something as massive as a novel. I am going to try writing some short stories and while I do so, I am going to practice my prewriting skills. J and I have been talking about some techniques specifically - things for me to try in order to get ideas down and sure before I start taking a pen to the rough draft. I have been resistant to this for quite a while - I always jumped into a rough draft head first before my memory got messed up. I could get it all down and not worry about getting things confused, even if I had to get up and do something else mid-draft. Now I am recognizing that I need more structure to keep me going the right way. I need a street with signs rather than a dirt path through the woods. I am going to try the brainstorming and prewriting techniques J and I talked about and see what works for me and what I need to try differently. If I can get things to work on a small scale - writing short stories - then maybe after some practice and honing, I can get those techniques to work for me when I return to writing the novel. We'll see what I can figure out. (And yes, honey, this is the part where you get to say, "I told you so." You are cute enough that I will let you get away with saying it!)

first attempt at a new form of creating

I am not entirely sure how to write what I want to write with this post, but I know that writing has a healing effect on me, and I want to write about this. I had a miscarriage on Wednesday. I was eight weeks and one day into the pregnancy. It was the first miscarriage I had that was a confirmed pregnancy, although having experienced it, I wonder if I have had a very early miscarriage once before. J and I celebrated ten years of marriage this past December, and this was the first time we were sure I had gotten pregnant. It was after a surgery to remove some polyps from my uterus that were apparently the problem both with my fertility and with the severe cramping I always had during that time of the month. We were both ecstatic that we were going to have a baby, and had to work really hard not to shout it out to the world. We told family and tried to leave it at that. We needed help with getting me to appointments since I am not currently okay to drive because of my epilepsy. Sunday evening, I started spotting. (I think it was Sunday. I was napping and exhausted through all of this, and the days were a blur.) I went to the doctor on Tuesday and got my HCG levels checked. They were borderline okay. I was told to rest and not do any strenuous activity. I obeyed that counsel to the letter, hardly getting up unless I needed to eat or use the restroom, or unless my dog needed to go out and no one else was at the house. (It would be easier on me to take him out than to clean up after him.) On Wednesday, I continued to bleed, and we went in to get me checked again. My HCG levels were down significantly; I had lost the baby. I had cried a lot while I was wondering and waiting after things started to take a turn for the worse. I didn't have very many tears left in me. At first, I felt numb and frightened. Then I felt peace. I don't know when a spirit joins with the body of a baby to make the living soul - if it is in the womb or after birth or somewhere in between. I felt that one of two things had happened. Either the baby was such a noble spirit that he/she didn't need to be tested or to learn in mortal life, and is already waiting for us in heaven, or if the spirit had not yet joined with the body, this little one is still waiting impatiently for another chance to come and join our family. Either thought is comforting. I don't know which way it works, or if there is something else going on that I can't quite comprehend with my mortal perspective. But for all of my tears and disappointment, I do feel that all is well, that the Lord knows what He is doing, and when the time is right, He will bless us with children. I will be able to join in that pinnacle of creativity and help to bring a new life into this world. It is a matter of waiting on the Lord's timing. In the meantime, I am comforted to know that I can be certain that I am able to get pregnant - my body is capable of it. For many years I was not sure of that. My husband and I will be able to create a new life and teach and raise the little one. When that happens, it will be a great joy.

feels more like i'm writing again

I worked on the novel some today. I didn't get a whole lot done, just my baseline 750 words of rough draft goal, but it felt good to actually get some work done on it. It felt like coming home again. Yesterday was also writer's club day at the public library, so I got some feedback on the novel. That also helped me to feel like I was making some progress, and to see the novel on a larger scale rather than focusing on the hiccups and bumps you always seem to encounter in the day to day rough draft writing. I have had happy news and sad news in large scale in my life recently. I won't go into the details, but it makes me stand back and realize how much life is prone to changing without our knowledge or permission. Maybe I need to incorporate that more into the novel. I believe I've got it in there to some degree already. It feels good to write again, even if I am still rather fuzz-brained.

Creativity calling to me

I still feel like junk. When my husband left for work this morning, he put me under orders to take a nap as soon as I finished with the vital stuff like eating breakfast and taking my morning meds. I just woke up from the nap, and I still feel fuzz-brained, but I also want very much to write. I find myself missing the characters I have created in my novel, missing both the creativity and the adventure of discovery inherent in writing some on it. I have been writing the novel down on my to-do list even as I have been feeling icky. I haven't crossed it off in a while, but it has been there, a reminder that I do want to work on it. I think I will actually try to work on it today - test the waters and see how I do, even with my mind feeling more like pudding than crystal clear water. We'll see what comes out of the pudding.

still human

I haven't written a whole lot in the last while except for my morning scribbles - the free writing I do every morning when I am doing light therapy. I am experiencing the evidence that I am still human, and my health gets frail sometimes. I am trying not to get too frustrated by it. Epilepsy is decidedly not my favorite thing because when the balance gets thrown off, it can take a while and some finagling to get myself as close to functional as I can again. In the meantime, I am trying to do what I can, and trying to maintain the balance of feeling somewhat vaguely useful and not pushing my already stressed body and mind too much. I haven't been sleeping very well, and I've been having strange dreams, which is evidence that I am worrying too much about being on a downswing as far as my epilepsy goes. I've already gone through feeling frustrated about it this go-round. Now I am trying to focus more on what I can do, and trying to enjoy the down time. Not everyone gets forced down time like that. I don't always succeed in being as optimistic, but I am trying to be. If nothing else, there are a lot of blessings and positive things happening in my life too. I can observe everything that I see happening around me, even take some notes when something strikes, me, and when I feel a little better; when I don't feel so fuzz-brained and disconnected from the world as I do right now, perhaps I will write about it and find a story line in there.

I wrote today. Those three words mean a lot to me right now. I am at a point where I let myself get intimidated out of writing easily. I seem to have so much else to do, and there are no guarantees with writing. It is a hobby, a long shot dream that might not ever amount to anything. Why should I keep up with it so obsessively? The reason is simple, even if I lose sight of it rather frequently. I write because it is lifeblood to me. It helps to keep me (somewhat) sane. It helps me to keep perspective in my life. It is my favorite means of creating. I believe we are beings who create. It is a matter of finding what we love to create. I have many things - from concocting things in the kitchen to knitting to sewing to writing. But writing is the one I love most of all - and I wrote today.