Writing on the Go

I'm traveling this morning. Blogging is likely to be even more sporadic than usual for the next few days, but I intend to put stuff up here, even if it's just photos of interesting stuff and snippets of what I'm writing. Warm-up words from the plane...

I’m a writer. So? Write.

It’s not that easy. I mean, yes, I can pour words out, and sometimes they fall in pleasing patterns. But I’m a lot of other things that aren’t a writer, and those things get in the way. Mostly, though, what gets in my way is me.

I’m not complaining. I like writing, and I like being a writer. I like the control of Indie, far more than I’d like tossing my babies to feed the fires of Moloch and turning my back on them. I like research, and writing gives me the excuse to do as much of that as possible and when people ask ‘why exactly do you have texts on medicolegal death investigation, Russian folklore, and Eastern Art on your table?’ I can give them an answer that seems more sane than just ‘I have a curious mind.’ And writing comes from reading, so I can buy books and justify them because they are feeding the writer side of my brain. For a girl who was once told she read too much, that’s a nice facade to have.

And for now, sitting in a gently rocking airplane seat with my feet stretched out, crossed at the ankle, while I nurse a ginger ale and contemplate the cookies I was just handed, I’m writing about the present, excited about the future, and remembering the past I never lived in. We were talking about food history on the drive to the airport, you see. It reminded me I’d like the chance to do more research on food, but then I remembered I’d planned to spend this trip writing in every spare minute. So I pulled out my Bluetooth keyboard, synced it to my phone, and started writing down what was falling out of my head. Because I’m a writer, but if I don’t discipline myself to actually write, it’s very easy to fall down the rabbit hole endlessly researching, reading, and dozing off instead of recording words on paper, even if they are useless warm-up words mostly intended to see if I can make myself write on the Tiny Setup. Which I can, although this keyboard is still a touch small for my hands and I typo frequently.

My other goal this trip? I need to break down my inhibitions about dictating story. I badly need to break that invisible inner wall that keeps me from using a tool to achieve my goals. (Foals? Really, brain? Ok, yes, small horses with knobby knees are amazingly cute and distracting. Sigh. Worse than kittens, really.) But if I can’t overcome this strictly mental impediment, I’m not going to manage to keep writing the way I want to. This year of twenty eighteen has been bad, in terms of writing production. In life, though?

I’m more than a writer. This year I became a Scientist in actual title. My husband and I bought a house, and moved. My second daughter graduated from high school. My second and third daughters both started at college. My husband transitioned out of one job and into another. My mother moved most of the way across the country to be nearer to me. The year isn’t over yet. I’m on the first leg of another adventure, and the Holiday season is coming.

I write through the filter of all of that, and perhaps because of those experiences adding flavor to the stories who make it past all the obstacles, they are made better. I don’t know. I just know that I want to continue to be a writer. So. I write.