This morning my daughter woke up with a "scratchy throat".  Noting to myself that she (and my two boys) will be off for Christmas break in just four days--and that this isn't the first such occurrence on a Monday morning--I was less than sympathetic.

"Take something," I said.

She didn't want to.  She wanted to go back to bed.

"You were able to eat your breakfast okay," I offered.

"It comes and goes," she told me.

"Well maybe if  you take something, it'll go away again."

She trudged off in response, probably cursing her bad luck to have such a mean mother.  By the time she got ready to go (and yes, she took two ibuprofen and packed some lozenges), she was feeling much better.

So that gives me today to write.  And for a few more days, I get to live the dream, having the time and space and opportunity to write when I want to (well, mostly).

This morning, I had planned to write a blog about how I wished my writer self would go into hibernation during Christmas break, since I won't have the above mentioned freedom to write.  But you know what?  I think really, even when we writers aren't writing, we're thinking about writing, running our next rewrite through our heads, our characters are still talking to us, and we are ultimately recharging for our next writing session, no matter what the season.

I plan to have the best Christmas of all, knowing my words and all the possibilities they bring will be waiting for me in the New Year.

And I wish you all the merriest of Christmases too :)  Cheers!

The Challenge

Well, I made it to round three in the NYC Flash Fiction Challenge.  I was so thrilled, I could hardly believe my good luck.  And, to boot, I got assigned the horror genre which I'd hoped for.

Everything seemed to go tickedy-boo.  I woke up Saturday morning, wrote my entire story and felt pretty good.  As the day crept on, though, I had this terrible feeling that it had been too easy.  I didn't like the title. I didn't like the ending.  There was too much telling and not enough showing.  I wasn't satisfied with my references to the main character's screwed up childhood.

So I rewrote.  My hubby Chris said, "You know you're going to rewrite that about a hundred times, right?" Well, maybe not a hundred times, but many times.  Yes, that's true.  He called it.

When I finally submitted I felt...unsettled.  Had I made a grievous error by sacrificing some of the raw emotion for a more subtle approach?  Was it too subtle?  Did I remember all the submission instructions?  I did remember to fill in all relevant fields on that submission page, didn't I?  It was in the correct font, right?

After I pressed send, I felt shaky.  What if I made a terrible, avoidable mistake?

(Yes, of course I went back and reread it one last time!)

In the end, it's out of my hands.  I'm grateful for the chance to have taken the challenge.  Now it's over and, hey, what's the worst thing that could happen?  Someone has to place last.

Writer's block is a funny thing.  Well, actually no, it's very un-funny...sad, frustrating, aggravating in its own maddening way.  

Perhaps it's more accurate to label it a strange thing.  

I hope my writer friends chime in here.  Doesn't it seem that the more we (sometimes force ourselves to) write the less we are plagued by the writer's block gremlin?  And of course, the opposite is equally true.  The less we write, the more we are intimidated by all those nasty blank spaces.  The act of writing primes the pump.

When I'm stumped and the blank page is HUGE, and feel like the creative juices have evaporated, I find all sorts of reasons why I don't have the time to write.  I have three children, two of which have special needs.  Advocating for them, scouting out and implementing services and strategies, takes a lot of time.  But the truth is, everyone is busy.  There are always other things we could be doing.  They're just excuses.  They're just the voice we shouldn't ever listen to, telling us we have nothing original or worthwhile to say.  Keep writing, move beyond the wall you perceive.  It's an imaginary wall anyway.  And you can break through it.

I keep hearing over and over, and it's just as true every time, writers write.  Every day.  That's what we do.  

For all my writer friends, do you write every day?  Do you feel terribly guilty when you don't?  What are some of your strategies to make it part of your daily routine?