Incredibly excited to pick up my new motorhome!

Waiting on my niece to be born! She is due May 10th. I wish she was here RIGHT NOW, however. I love being an aunt. I currently have two nephews, and am so excited to add to the bunch. I’m ready for some new baby smell!

Writing, writing, and writing some more. I finished editing an eight thousand word short story the other day, along with a few flash fictions, and I’m thinking about starting a novel that would take place after that short story. Of course, I’m about forty thousand words into a different novel right now, so I’m all over the place. That’s how I work though, I’m always hopping from project to project. There’s nothing more satisfying than finishing the editing on a piece, and because of the way I hop around, I often go long periods with nothing done and then have a slew of things done all at once.

Still geeking out over The Avengers! I already went to see it, and I still can’t believe it’s finally here. It’s one of those few times where I don’t feel like I’m going to get you too excited with how much I loved it, because it really does live up to the hype. I love that really if you wrote down the plot line, it’s the normal predictable story line for a super hero. Except, Joss Whedon wrote it. And what does the man do best? Ensemble casts! The relationships between all the charachters is just perfect. Schwarma!

And more! Most of this includes working, reading, and trying to keep everything straight. This is a great time to be feeling sicker than usual and have given up on using my planner, right? Right.

If I can’t pick the right music for my mood, I have a very hard time moving to actually working and filling up that blank page. My thoughts become disjointed, my body tense, and each word if a hard struggle.

But with the right sounds? It’s like my body falls into tune. My mind and shoulders relax, outside my headphones is the fast tip, tap, tip tap of the keys, but I don’t even notice the soothing sound. It feels like I’ve hit the right frequency to let me slide into another world, and I’m gone. The wrong song comes on, I snap out, hit the skip button, and slide right back in.

There are certainly days that don’t work like this, but they mostly go down as the days I couldn’t find a single agreeable song. In contrast, there have definitely been those days where I’ve listened to just one song loudly on repeat for hours on end to reach the conclusion of a story it inspired.

Music is more than just my inspiration, or even my motivation, it’s part of my writing routine. Though my words are hopefully always changing, my routine changes little, and when it does, my relationship with music always stays the same. The music I listen to helps mark my days.

Do you have a music routine, some other routine that helps you work, or are you one of those people that avoids routines?

I have this great big secret that I steer conversations around to avoid explaining to people. Wanna know what it is? Of course, you do! Ok, here it is: I write on paper. With a pen.

Man, does it feel great to get that off my chest!

You might think that’s a silly thing to try and keep a secret, but I promise you that every couple months I find another article listing writers that don’t write on their computers, listing and explaining their actions like they’re circus freaks from the past. Look at them, scribbling with their antiques! How odd, how strange! Those artsy types you know, always having to be just a little bit different now, don’t they?

It’s terribly inconvenient, to tell you the truth. I spent a long time struggling to just get myself started with a paragraph or two on paper and then switching to the computer… but I eventually noticed that what I’d written on paper was noticeably better writing than what I’d tapped out on the keyboard. I find it much easier to get connected to my story if I’m cramping up my hand gripping a pen and scribbling out words I have a hard time reading, later. Honestly, my handwriting gets pretty atrocious.

So, there it is. My odd little secret. Add me to the list of oddballs on your next blog post, will you? Put me right next to that strange man who still uses paper maps, he looks like a nice fellow.

“Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.”
Stephen King

All the same, I think I’ll read what I’ve written in a few days…or weeks…and just keep going.