Unbelievable! When I restarted this blog in September, twelve weeks and twelve episodes seemed like an attainable but initimdating goal. Thank you Pep, JoJo, Erika and others whose IP addresses I don't recognize for faithfully reading along and offering feedback along the way.
Last night, Matt, Alice and I got to attend Wits at the Fitzgerald Theater. This is, as one of the ushers said to another attendee, "a sort of younger, nerdier, faster type of Prairie Home Companion." John Hodgeman was host John Moe's featured guest. He's a writer and he touched on this whole concept of "I must write.I can't not write." It was a sort of tortured writers approach, one that I have heard before, but true none the less. I've also been following Caragh O'Brien's blog. She is wonderful in sharing glimpses of the writing and editing process to her readers, and I love it. I am starting to sort of feel the slightest of companionship with these writers. They model what a possible life of writing as work may be for me one day. But that day is far, far away, and many mediocre blog entries and terrible attempts at fiction are likely between here and there.
This blog has been a very good discipline for me. That was part of why it began. Part of the discipline I hoped would be preloading the post by Friday at 5 p.m., but that rarely happenned. And depending on which computer I am writing from, sometimes the preloading/auto publishing doesn't work. More often than not I ended up writing the post on Saturday morning or at somepoint on Saturday for Sunday publishing. That was generally okay, exept perhaps a couple of times where I had to both write and publish the blog from the cabin and that ended up influencing what we did and where we went that day. (i.e. we had to go into town to get the wireless signal).
The hope of me working on the blog while the kids did homework was very noble but completely unattainable. Why? Well, kids these days (at least my kids who are 11 and 8) don't quietly go off to the dining room table and do 30 minutes of homework. They either have piano lessons, rock climbing, or fencing. And when we do have the homework time, it is a joint effort. It is a journey of focusing and refocusing and checking and rechecking. I have no idea how JK Rowling wrote anything while she was at the coffee shop with her young kid (as I understand she did). I tried one night writing while the kids were doing homework and it was just a disaster. I think I got one sentence written.
But I am glad I made this effort and am writing more again. I still have much to learn and will certainly pick this up again after the new year.
In the meantime, next week my dreamblog kicks in -- something I have wanted to do for a while but finally have the time avaialable for it. My "Inside of Waiting" blog launches on Sunday November 27 and there will be a post a day between the 27th and December 24, the traditional Christian season of Advent. (Christian is a loaded word in some ways, I wish there was a better one). "Curating" that blog has been really, really fun. It will include a handful of blogs by others and a handful by me -- all delving more deeply into what it means to wait and what we can learn from it -- especially during this end of year time of rush rush rush. I hope you'll visit me there at http://www.insideofwaiting.blogspot.com/
See you in 2012 and thanks for reading.
Amy
