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.

Fresh Start

I think I know part of why I was feeling bogged down and not writing as much as I wanted to now. I just finished doing a read-through of the draft thus far, and there were a lot of inconsistencies. I went through and corrected those yesterday and today, and I wrote almost eight hundred words today. That isn't the most record-breaking day of writing I've ever done, but it is getting myself pointed in the right direction again. That feels better. I have also been reading more. My memory isn't as strong as it used to be, which makes reading long novels rather intimidating for me. (kind of ironic, considering the task I am undertaking - to write a novel. At least when I am writing, I can have notes and reminders on my desktop, waiting for me to need them!) I finished one novel the other day and started another one today. It has been a long time since I've read just for fun, and it feels good to go back to it. I know that reading more will strengthen my writing too. Steeping yourself in language and expression is a good thing to do when you are writing.

less sunshine

The days are getting shorter, and that means my seasonal affective disorder is raging stronger and stronger. I keep telling myself it won't be too much longer until the winter equinox, and then the days will slowly start to get longer again. I have felt really down this year - curl up and cry on the couch and not feel like doing anything on some days. I know what I need to do to feel okay - things like light therapy, exercise, and writing all help me to feel more content and less depressed. It's just that some days there is a huge gap between knowing what I have to do to feel okay and having the desire to do it. Thus, I have not worked on my novel much in several days. I started exercising again yesterday, and that has helped my motivation. It also has my knee feeling a little better, even with all the cold air moving into our area. I think I may need to give myself a fresh start working on the novel - read back over what I have, review my outlines and plans, and write any other ideas that come to my mind. That will help me feel like I am not trying to push a tractor-trailer up a hill to get started again. Having a memory that does not work as well as it could makes it harder to write consistently - both time-wise and story line-wise. I am doing the best I can, though, and when my depression and my frustration at my funky memory don't get in the way, I enjoy myself.

I've been thinking

I have been thinking about how I do my blog. It is essentially about how I use writing to hold my life together - hence the title of the blog, creative glue. But I also want to focus more on the craft of writing: what methods I use, everything from the essential hammer and nails of my craft to the minute details. I want to post more details that might be useful to other writers. I am still figuring out how I would be able to accomplish that. I still want to use it as a means of accountability as well - post when I have been doing well with my writing goals and when I have flubbed, and analyze why I may have flubbed. I think seeing my efforts documented like that is helpful to me, and may be helpful to other writers as well - accountability to the goals you set is a major part of accomplishing what you set out to do in writing. In the writer's group I attend, I got a LOT of feedback on Thursday. I had people apologizing for tearing my work up one side and down the other. I was not offended, though. I knew that what I had brought in needed a lot of work. I was excited to have a new perspective and to see what I could do to make it work better. Humility goes a long way when you are revising and getting feedback on your work. That is hard to do because your work is your baby, and you have the innate desire to shelter and protect it. But it cannot get strong if you defend it all the time instead of letting it grow. I was being mature this week, and taking the criticism from my fellow writers, plotting to make good use of it. I am getting excited about NaNoWriMo. It will start in November. (For those of you who haven't got a clue what that is, see www.nanowrimo.org) This will be my third year participating in NaNoWriMo. I have the ideas planned out for what I will write, and it is mostly a matter of doing the arithmetic to see how many words I need to write per day to make the goal of fifty thousand words by the end of November, taking into account the days I will not get the chance to write. I guess that gets to count as my method mentioned for today - set specific goals for your writing so you aren't just floundering. My usual goal is to get at least a thousand words written per day on the novel. I find it works better for me to do it in five hundred word spurts rather than trying to conquer it all at once. If I get more than a thousand, more power to me. If I get just the thousand, I have still made a lot of progress. Specific goals are something that help me make progress.

it's been a while

It has been a while since I have posted in my blog. I am not entirely sure what to write about, because I haven't been writing a whole lot in the last little while. It seems like I go through cycles - times when I do well and writing comes easily, and times when I am distracted by other things and don't get much done. I guess that is human nature in general, but there is something that drives me to accomplish more as a writer, and I feel like I am letting some part of me fail when I am not consistent with my writing goals. That sounds like I am being really hard on myself when I say that, but I really do feel guilty for not having written much. I went to a conference with J out of town, and brought some free writing stuff with me to work on while I was there. It wasn't very practical to bring the novel with me - it is in a file on my old mac, and it is long enough that printing it out would have been more trouble than it is worth. I got some ideas jotted down, but that was about the extent of it. We had cleaned out our kitchen pretty well before heading out on the trip - just for the sake of not having stuff left behind to go bad while we were gone. Now I am in the process of cooking and getting some stuff in the freezer to be quickie meals later. That is taking up a decent portion of my day today. I have made applesauce bread as well as a few batches of chicken pot pie filling to freeze for later. I have some tortilla dough started to go with the chicken enchilada filling that is waiting in the fridge for dinner to roll around. I am thinking that either today or tomorrow, I will make a large batch of burritos and freeze them. I have done that once before, and it was nice to have a quick meal like that on hand. That will be a major production - cooking black beans, rice, and pinto beans, then putting the pinto beans in the food processor with some salsa, and mixing it all together with some corn, cheese, and seasonings. Then I will make a huge batch of tortillas and assemble a bunch of burritos. I wrap each one in foil individually, then store them in gallon ziploc bags. That way, I can use them like you would a store-bought frozen burrito, but they are a lot healthier. I don't put any lard or gook like that in there, and I use brown rice. I guess I am writing on this blog partly to show that although I haven't been writing a lot, I am pursuing some creative endeavors, and partly to convince myself to get some writing done, even if it is just a little. This counts as my own personal guilt trip/motivational speech. Now I had better go do something so I can claim that it worked!

I'm a worrywart, but I have wheat to play with now!

I am trying to get back into the swing of things with writing, and only succeeding somewhat. J has suggested that I try writing plays and dialogues and try to get them published. He thinks it would be good to submit some stuff to the company where he got the play the drama club will be doing in one-act competition this year. I am going to free write and brainstorm and try to come up with ideas for that. I ordered a hundred pounds of hard red wheat from a local store recently, and it has come in, so I am feeling the need to play in the kitchen some. I made some double-sized english muffins this morning, and right now some tomatoes are simmering with peppers, garlic, and onion to become the pizza sauce to make english muffin pizzas. I am also contemplating making some carrot cake muffins and some soft pretzels. I need to be good and not get too wild with all the baking I want to do. I don't want to make more than we can eat before it spoils. Baking does make a good creative outlet for me, though, although not quite as good as writing. I keep thinking about this winter. Everything I have seen and felt makes me believe it is going to be a nasty one in our area. I got particularly good harvests from both the berry brambles and the apple trees. There has been a lot of fog in the morning. My old, arthritic knee has been grousing a lot more than usual without any storms nearby to explain why. So all told, I am suspicious. We have plenty of wood for our wood stove to help us get through the winter as far as our power bill goes. I still wonder and worry, though, since I am a worrywart in general. I guess more than anything else, I need to write more so I can focus all my wondering in a more positive direction - wondering what I will do next with the story line instead of what will happen in a few months that I can't do anything about just yet. I could wonder what story lines and ideas I could come up with based on the idea of a hard winter.

canning apples, and a pig in my yard!

I have not been writing a whole lot in the last little while because the apple trees in my backyard, and the apples they have produced, demand attention. I have been canning apples with all my might. This year, I have mostly been making apple butter and apple cider - it makes more sense to can the stuff we use more frequently. I figured out a quick cheat for making cider. All the recipes I've found online talk about making applesauce and then straining it seventeen billion times! That gets rather tedious. i decided to try making applesauce, then watering it down significantly and boiling it to get the apple flavor all throughout. I then add the sugar and spices and can it. It works pretty well, and it still tastes just as good to me. Everything I have been looking at suggests a nasty winter for our area - both berry brambles and apple trees producing really well, lots of fog in the morning in august, and my old, arthritic knee grousing frequently - more so than usual. So I am imagining myself curled up a lot this winter with a mug of hot apple cider while the wood stove crackles away, giving the house a slight hint of wood smoke aroma. I am being naughty in not keeping up a good writing schedule right now. Part of it is that I have been called in to substitute teach a lot in August. (Strange to be called in that early in the school year!) Part of it also stems from being afraid that I won't be able to keep up the pace and quality of what I have been writing. I am getting too perfectionistic and intimidating myself out of writing. I need to stop it - to slap myself on the wrist and allow myself to write whatever I write, then go back and fix it if it needs fixing, and if it doesn't, enjoy what I have been able to create. It amazes me how many times I have to remind myself not to get so caught up in writing perfectly that I am afraid to write. All I can do is keep on going back to that when I get writer's block. In other random occurrences, I went to take my dog out in the yard to do his business, and found a black pig walking around in the front yard! The postman was coming by at that time, and I asked him if he knew who she belonged to, and he said that she lived down the road. I tried driving down to the house he indicated, but no one answered the door. Since she was hanging around, and i had apple cores from working on canning apples, I gave her some to munch on, and after she finished those, she went on her merry way. That's not something you get to do every day!