Writing....

Tonight I was sitting on my lawn picking weeds out of the lawn and reading a book called "Write Your Heart Out". As I sat there reading cars drove by and I thought, "I really love to write." At times I feel guilty when I could write and I don't. But there are times when your just life happens and you need to enjoy it. I need to enjoy things like kicking the soccer ball around with my son, things like reading a good book, things like holding my son who just woke up from a nap, like watch a favorite show on TV. I am a writer and will always be a writer; I need to relax.

My mind needs to take a break from writing sometimes and needs to let everthing marinate around in there like a good stew that always tastes better the next day. I get myself all wound and coiled up like a spring and the guilt of not writing bounces around in my head. I don't know if I will ever be a writer full time but I will always write. Finding ways to put writing into my life is a way to keep writing. I volunteer to write articles for my church newletter that comes out once a quarter. I write poems, but have not written any in month of August, that's ok though, everything will be ok. I will keep writing in my journal and I may someday write a memoir (can't everyone do that?). I will write in this blog, and others. I have a novel in me about a dog name Fido that keep I working on here and there. I will keep collecting my writing quotes and one day will put together some kind of quote book. I will improve and grow in my skill and craft; having fear over not writing does nothing for me. I won't be dauted....

"I am a writer if I never write another line; I am alive if I never step out of this room again....the problem is not to expand a feeling, but to condense a feeling--all thought, tangled and tumbled in the empty crowded head of a writer--to one clear thought, one clear form, and still preserve the enormity, the hugeness, the unbearable all-at-onceness of being alive and knowing it, too." ~Tess Slesinger, A Life in the Day of a Writer

And I will follow Ray Bradbury' advice:

"...if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. . . For the first thing a writer should be is -- excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it’d be better for his health"
~Ray Bradbury, From: "The Joy of Writing", ZEN IN THE ART OF WRITING..