Writing life woes

I feel like I'm not putting in enough writing time these days. I still write my short - ten-minute - poem every morning and a journal entry every night before I go to bed, but I have three started memoirs that I need to work on and finish once and for all. But all is not grim. I still attend my memoir class every week and read a piece there at least twice a month. I also still write in my writing group the first and third Tuesdays of the month. At the start we're given a prompt, write for about forty-five minutes, and then read what we've written in real time to the group. I have that opportunity this afternoon. As always, it's very nerve racking. Here are four recent poems I wrote lately about my current writing life. Why do I keep at it? Why am I so obsessed? I don’t have to write A poem a day I don’t have to write A journal entry every day. But still I sit down here And open my computer, pull Up my ten-minute poem doc And scroll down To the end, Three hundred and Thirty-two … [Read more...]

A progress report

In John Lennon's song, Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy), he sings: Life is what happens when you're making other plans. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_j-tpmdPlI My mother always said something similar: Man plans, and God laughs. Well, life was sure happening to me last week. I worked diligently on my book, as I said I would do in my previous blog post, for the first three days, and I actually made some great progress. Then boom! It all fell apart. My husband, Bob, woke up early last Thursday morning with shortness of breath. I took him to urgent care and he got an EKG. With those results the doctor there said take him to emergency at our local hospital. And we were off and running. Two and a half days later and tests to rule out a heart attack, pneumonia, blood clots in his lungs, and congestive heart failure, he was feeling better. So they sent him home. Less than 24 hours later, he was short of breath again even worse. This time we called his own doctor (who had … [Read more...]

What happened in November

Since returning from our three-week trip to Central America, Raleigh NC, and New York City on November 6, I've been intent on getting back into my daily writing routine. Here's what I did in November to start moving in that direction. Please note that I didn't spend this month just writing. I think reading and seeing movies, opera, and plays are all grist for the mill and great learning devices. In November I: Wrote a poem every day to fulfill Robert Lee Brewer's November 2015 PAD challenge wrote the last one today Wrote a journal entry every day to fulfill my personal writing challenge Wrote a piece for Naturally Savvy I have a blog there called Savvy Over 60 Wrote a piece about how I got my book published for an Authors Publish anthology - not accepted yet Read: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, Marilyn by Gloria Steinem, Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee, and Room (the second time) by Emma Donoghue Started to read: The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr, … [Read more...]