This summer was a hard one.
Someone greatly, greatly loved by me recently succumbed to that bloody awful disease, cancer. Read more
Routine and the Writer’s Life: How my journal saves me every time.
Do you journal? I do. I first learned to write by reading Natalie Golberg’s, Writing Down the Bones and utilizing her method of free writing. Not long after was Julia Cameron’s, The Artist’s Way, and her practice of writing three pages every day. These were my beginning teachers and these are the lessons that still keep me connected to writing even in the most hectic times and some of my hardest times.
This summer we’ve been under renovations and on a mission to clean out old junk and papers. This has been a long-time coming, but a deck and bathroom project gave us the impetus to hire a bin for a week. So we spent our August long-weekend digging out our basement to fill the remaining space with anything ready to go.
Total Eclipse of the Brain
Did you see it? Have you felt it?
This weeks blog is brought to you by a complete block of the brain. Kind of like the recent planetary event the whole of North America was pumped up about. Mind you, the eclipse was more of a celebration in the U.S. where one could witness a complete cover of the sun by the moon. Sales of eclipse sunglasses skyrocketed and souvenir eclipse t-shirts flew out of Amazon warehouses.
I was at work when it happened here in Ontario, Canada. The sky grew a smidgen darker, not the kind you notice at dusk, but a different kind. Felt like an impending doom kind of dark. But since it wasn’t a total eclipse, the sun still managed to shine when the clouds moved away. This is how my writing activity has been this summer. Nothing, then a little glimmer of something, then nothing. Read more
Secret of Inspiration
Can I tell you a secret?
What? I’m always telling secrets?
Well, maybe I am, but that’s never stopped me before.
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Summer: Time to be Inspired
It’s Tuesday morning and we’re off to the Keady market, something I am only able to do in summer months when I can sneak a day off mid week. In the dim light, I squeeze into the livestock auction. The musty smell of the animals and manure overwhelms until my nose adjusts to the stench.
Everything about this event makes me feel like I am in a movie; from the auctioneer calling out in the trademark spew of an un-breaking chain of numbers, to the weatherworn faces of the farmers, their eyes seeing something in the lots of cows that my own eyes are unable to discern, to the worn plank seating.
My novel needs an auction scene.
Maybe a horse auction. Then I think of famous markets – the camel market in India; the pearl market in Beijing; the witches market in Bolivia. Maybe my novel should have a dragon auction! My mind whirls as I imagine the chaos of dragons here in Keady instead of cows.
Reading Good Fiction to Write Good Fiction
New Year’s resolutions! We’ve all made them, we’ve all broken them, and sometimes we’ve even kept them.
The latter is the case when it comes to my 2017 resolution, which was to read more fiction.
I had been asked to join the Ascribe Writers group in the fall of 2016 and as I wrote in a previous blog post, I was pretty green to the world of fiction. Read more
Vows & Speeches
My son was recently married and several hours before the ceremony he announced he did not want to write his vows but wanted to speak from the heart and wing it. I had not thought to pack my “Speeches for Every Occasion” or “Choosing Calm over Panic” reference books along with my wedding finery.
The wedding day dawned warm and sunny, promising perfect weather for the celebration. He and I and my grandson relished a quiet morning visiting, listening to music he was recording for the reception and generally easing into the day before the inevitable chaos of preparations would prevail. Read more
Forgive and Give Yourself Permission
I recently completed the Muskoka Novel Marathon for the third time, which, considering we raised over $30,000 to support adult literacy programs, is amazing, but this year that marathon was at times, a painful struggle. As I reflect, sitting on my deck, watching my cats make peace after an earlier squabble, I realized that I as well needed to forgive. To forgive myself for poor writing and to give myself permission to write, even poorly. Read more