The clutter of memories

Some days writing is easier, because my mind is loose and free of all the clutter that are memory.  I do mental exercises, and meditation to clear my mind. Sometimes it works, other times it intensifies the clutter. Add to that the anxiety I often feel over whether my writing will be good enough, and you have a recipe for a hot mess. I know I shouldn’t feel anxious. Whether my writing is good enough or not, It really does not matter. Only that I continue writing. Continue improving. It’s not just my writing, it is everything I do. I have the same anxieties with my art and with my crafts. Even though I can see improvements in the drawings I am doing.  I do not believe myself alone in my anxieties about what i create, as I have seen many creative types express similar feelings.

Starting and Struggling

As an Indie writer, I understand how hard it is to find people to assist in publication. No book is all about just the written words. There is the writing, The editing, the Illustrating (If it is illustrated), The marketing, The publication. Really it is something many of us try to do on our own. Part of the reason is because it feels like no one out there honestly cares about what we do as we care.  I have a friend who is also an Indie writer. She has published two wonderful Children’s books (The Woodland Adventures)….And is working on the third. She has had two different Illustrators. The first was a wonderful Artist Spirit Horse Studios who due to a surprise new addition to her family had to bow out of the second book. So my friend, Redbird Stormcrow, Found another Illustrator. Only problem is the newest Illustrator doesn’t seem to want to promote her own work. Which any author would feel slighted by. So my friend is about to put out the third book in the series, and is looking for a Illustrator. And not looking for huge costs, and wanting someone who would actually at least take some pride in what they do. It amazes me that there are artists who don’t take pride in their work. I would offer to draw for her but I am awful at cats (the next book has a lot of cats!) So if you are an artist and looking for a start…look her up…

Her author page is still in processing, but when it’s up, go show her some Love! ❤

the muse’s bite

I have at least three novels i am trying to finish at the moment. so I am trying to avoid starting any new stories.  then a steampunk/post apocalyptic story started in my head two days ago. I have not been able to thing of anything else since. I wrote some on elizabeth, fighting off this new story….and ended up with a headache for my trouble. I am amazed at how insistent the muse can be at times.  I am also amazed how absent it can be. The hole that is left when the muse sleeps is painful.

Add to the whimsy that is my muse, is the technical issues of my phone dying. I am not making excuses, just saying that the mobility of the phone made it easier to write. So now when the muse strikes i have to find the laptop or paper. Paper used to be abundant in my home. Not in years though. So i have to fight with an overburdened laptop that is missing keys. (seriously the tab key, the backspace key and the “m” key are missing from the laptops keyboard). It has very little memory and is running win Xp. It’s not mine, it belongs to Joe (my best friend/lover). So i dare not change the  OS. (it would be Linux if i could).  So i gave into the Muse tonight. I wrote over 350 words (and still counting) on the new story.  I may decide that what i wrote is garbage and go in and rewrite it completely. Still for now, I have now four stories to complete and the eternal current volume of poetry. I really love my muse…even though days are there when i truly hate my muse…

20 Reasons Why Donald Trump Should Never Be President

One astute blog commenter once said that this blog was “the death of art and meaning.” I kind of took that as a compliment. Do you understand the type of power I have to construct a boo…

Source: 20 Reasons Why Donald Trump Should Never Be President

Looking for Inspiration

This year has been better than last, Emotionally and physically I am in a good place. Still after the hell that was 2015, I find myself in more of a hold than normal. I normally write at least 70 poems in a year and at least a story of some sort.  Even if I end up destroying the stories, I do write them. Yet this year has been an inspirational void. I have them…after major life changes.  It makes sense if you think about it. How does one appreciate the poetry of life, when the mind is still adjusting to chaos that comes from being truly a hot mess. I still see the poetry, still feel the story.  Surrealism clouds a busy mind.

For me March is one I almost always have a distracted mind during. This month is my birthday month. I am not a single bit worried about my age, however that doesn’t mean I don’t contemplate what growing older means. I expected that I would be so much more and yet I am farther than I thought I would be. So many of life’s choices have led me down a path that led me in both dark and light places that i could have never imagined. Today I am forty. I have made choices, both good and bad.  In Eleven days, I will be forty and one . It always strikes me as strange.  Perhaps that is why March sets me on my ear.

Distractions of the heart

I really have been trying to write lately. I am not one of those who can structure my writing. I can write everyday, and I do. Still this week has been a time of pure distraction. Even down to my writing app not functioning. My mind has been foggy, and I am quite afraid that if the app had worked…well it probably would have been something I deleted a day later. I have resolved to never delete what I write the same day. In some ways it keeps me from getting disgusted with what I have written and deciding it’s garbage…whether it really is or not.

So I have been doing other writing exercises. A journal, a bit of blogging, and still my heart aches. I have several work in progress that feel like I will never finish.  It makes my heart ache because I feel like such a failure. In all honesty, I wrote my first novel at ten. However, in frustration and self doubt, I threw it away. I forgot what I wrote. So the uncertainty of that early failure (the trashing of what i wrote is the failure) followed me. I  write, I publish. So far only a novella, a children’s book, and four volumes of poetry.  I publish because it doesn’t cost anything. Perhaps  it is still my self doubt that holds me back. I battle the low self esteem as I have my whole life. I am perhaps never going to see myself as others do. And that is actually Ok. I would love to see even once that which others see in me, but if not, then I will survive. I will continue to write because without it, I am nothing. I will continue to be kind and helpful to others, because it is not in me to be unkind.  I will continue to be creative in every way I can find. For the creativity helps me to feel less ugly. Perhaps that is all there is in life. Finding beauty in the ugly of life.

Catching a cliche

Well even though my phone was my main way of writing, I found a way. There is an android emulator for windows, Blue Stacks. I have been playing around with it off and on since it first came out a couple of years ago. It doesn’t work as good as my phone did, because the computer is old and slow. But it does work. So I downloaded my Notebooks app. I went to restore…as it has the option from dropbox and google drive.

Wouldn’t you know it, I accidentally backed up on the dropbox and when i tried to restore from Google drive, it couldn’t connect. so I was miserable wondering how i would be able to continue what i had been working on. Then i was looking at Kindle fire tablets. I may try and buy myself one for a birthday gift next week. I was looking in to app compatibility, and got to thinking, So i went to Dropboxes site to see if i could restore an older version of the file. Guess what? I can. So now i am able to write again. I swear i don’t normally do this. Tonight when I was trying to write, I kept  switching every few minutes to scrolling facebook. When I caught myself doing it, I felt like i had caught a cliche…a writer who is surfing more than she writes. Hopefully now that my setup is fixed, I will no longer hunt the cliche.

In the loneliness

here i sit uncertain and alone,
Planning uncertainty
for so little is known.
Hearing the negative,
so loud inside my head,
Tossing and turning.
can’t go to bed.

Those who should praise me
Do naught but to doubt,
Those who should see me,
For them i am not really around.
Invisible and struggling.
Sinking when I should swim,
The ocean of doubt crashes within
The struggle about
Just trying to begin.

I know better than to hear
The darkness within
I know i am better than I ever
possibly have been.
Yet in the loneliness,
Deep in the night,
That is when the voice within
is hardest to fight,
when no one is there
to help fight it off.
no one is there to remind you
of the cost

How has the times changed…

I remember as a Preteen hating to wear my hair short. I have always been bulky and slightly tomboyish. So I was picked on because apparently I looked like a boy…even though I had breasts. So I always wore my hair long back then. I fought for the ability to wear it long. Tonight I had a talk with my preteen daughter. She fights to wear her hair short (because it requires less care). I asked her if she gets picked on because of her hair. Her response was that she doesn’t get picked on, apparently she is invisible.
I guess in these times of gender neutrality it makes sense. I was her age in 1988…so many things have changed in that time. There are other differences as well. In my daughter’s time there is so many more hazards that were either not there or not obvious when I was her age. I remember the struggles and try to use that when dealing with her, but even with that memory it is so different for her than it was for me, so there are times when the generation gap feels like a chasm.

Technology is both blessing and bane

        Last night i had the most horrific thing happen….my Phone died. Now understand….My cell phone was basically a tablet…i used it for everything. It was my calendar,  my communication, my camera, my kindle, texting,  my writing tool, and my gaming device. Everything except a phone. I may loose progress on some of my writing because of this. I have a laptop that i borrow from my boyfriend. It is a older model, windows xp laptop. It is missing the backspace, the tab and the m keys. It so doesn’t have the CPU or the hard drive space to do much more than simple programs…however until i can replace my tablet…i have no choice. I am not out on the streets broke, but there is no extra money. I am scraping to try and get a vehicle, and of course my microwave broke as well. So yes, i cannot afford the extra expense of a tablet. Which for me means suffering to write on this crappy laptop. It means dealing with the extra headache of accessing WordPress through an android emulator because the browsers on this laptop seem to have issues with most pages. It means in order to blog or even try and update my author page on Facebook I will have to sit down and actually fight this beast. So though i am enjoying the blogging and enjoying the spurt of writing i have been doing lately, it means life will likely interfere a wee bit more. Please bear with me. I will update, but it may not be daily. I am going to get me  another tablet, it just may take me some time.   thank you for understanding, or i am sorry if you don’t. This is just how my life goes.