It Is What It Is

You know, when I decided to take a writing break for the month of December, I fully expected to start the new year by sliding effortlessly back into the writing groove. As you might have noted, this hasn’t happened . . . yet.

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about it. And one of the things that keeps running through my mind is an incident I witnessed early one morning in Niagara Falls.

The hubby and I went to Niagara to ring in the New Year. I get up much earlier than him, so I would get up and walk to the Tim Hortons about a third of the way down Clifton Hill (the main drag) and have breakfast there before going on a long walk.

Anyway, Tims didn’t open until 7:30 and I got there early, so I stood around with a couple other people, waiting. Off to the side, on the fringes, so to speak, was an old guy with a shopping cart filled with junk. It was pretty obvious he was homeless. He wasn’t bothering anyone, just hanging around waiting for Tims to open like the rest of us.

The woman behind me in the loose line rummaged around in her purse and pulled out a twenty dollar bill, and gave it to the homeless guy. But that’s only part of what made this incident memorable.

By this time there were half a dozen of us lined up. Tims opened and we went inside and placed our orders. I sat down with my breakfast and my Kindle, and I noticed the homeless guy come in. And I also noticed the way the staff were reluctant to serve him. He sat at the table closest to the door and wasn’t bothering anyone, but one Tims worker in particular seemed to give him a hard time. She told him, “I told you before, you can’t be in here.” Which I thought was really weird considering he was a paying customer. Eventually, she called a security guard to roust him out of there.

Now here’s where my writer’s brain kicked in. While I’m sure there was a reasonable explanation for this – maybe they’ve had trouble with him before – I couldn’t help making up my own explanation.

Like, maybe he was the woman’s estranged father who’d fallen on hard times. He’d turned over a new leaf and was trying to get his life back on track. But because of past bad blood between them, she was unwilling to forgive and forget. But he was persistent to the point where she got a restraining order against him, which he was ignoring in his desperation to make amends.

Okay, maybe that was a bit of a stretch, but you can see how a writer’s mind can make a whole story out of a random encounter.

All this is to stay, the writing fire is still burning in me, I just need to fan the flames a little. I might not be ready to dive back into writing yet, but I’m getting closer.

Meanwhile, it is what it is ‘till it’s not then it ain’t.

Happy New Year!

How was your holiday?

I have to admit I enjoyed my blogging break immensely. I don’t think I realized before how much time I was spending thinking about blogs, coming up with ideas, researching ideas, and then writing about them. It can be incredibly time consuming – no wonder I didn’t have a lot of time for anything else.

So during the break I did a lot of thinking about what I wanted to accomplish, and how I could accomplish it. And I decided it was time to take a step back from the blog schedule. To be honest, I’m not sure how I ended up on this strict blog schedule in the first place.

Where did the detailed Wordage Report come from? Sometimes it takes forever to come up with an idea to preface the report, which is time consuming, as is researching the idea and creating a post about it.

Ditto for Poetry Wednesdays. Coming up with a new form a week can be very time consuming – they’re getting harder and harder to find, too. And again, then I have to research the form, create the post, and come up with an example that rarely comes easily to me. And the sad part is, the only poetry I wrote last year were forms or poemwork for my poetry group. I wrote nothing for pleasure.

And where did Fiction Fridays come from? I mean, yeah, it’s nice to share what I’m working on once in a while, but every Friday? I’ve got over a hundred flash stories – some good, some not so good – that are the result of having to post something on Fridays, but because of this “blog schedule” I don’t really have time to do anything with them.

When I started this blog, I had a manifesto that read:

I will not be sticking to a schedule, just updating as the spirit moves me.
I will not be sharing the length of time my writing sessions are.
I will be showing progress bars on my current projects.
I will be talking about said projects.
I will be talking honestly about how the writing's going.

That was it. That’s how it all started, and that’s what I’m going back to.

Starting this week there will be no more Wordage Reports, no more Fiction Fridays, and no more Poetry Wednesdays. I’ll post when I have something to say. If I write a poem, I’ll probably share it. If I come up with the idea for a new serial, I may share that as well. And I’ll periodically share how the writing/editing is going.

But no more distracting schedules. Hopefully, without the burden of the can’t do that I have to write a blog post hanging over my head, I’ll finally get my writing back on track.

One can only hope. 😊

Changes