What I’m hearing, persistently from a few valuable friends, and less certainly from myself, is it’s time to step into the open with my writing. I’ve been writing regularly since college. The word regularly might not reveal the whole truth. The truth is I continued writing after graduating, and I’m writing now, and I’ve never given it up, but the regularity, the routine, is interspersed with long, guilt-ridden periods of inactivity. Sometimes all I write about is wishing I would stop wanting to write. When I do write, I’m home alone and I open a journal or my laptop, and I get a scene out, or a conversation, or a setting, and then I press save or close my book. And no one needs to know. I like it that way, the secret activity, and the secret inactivity on all those days when I don’t work to find a scene or a setting. Since leaving my college writing workshops behind, the completion of a story is met by my own sense of satisfaction, but the question marks and comments in the margins are harder to come by. I’ve been going on like this for a few years, and I send a story or two out, and once in a while that’s gotten me somewhere, but lately I’ve been feeling a tug. Behind all those pages I’ve written about my wish to want to stop writing, is the fear that I will stop, perhaps that even now I’m coming to a stop. I think when that fear was strongest is when I began to feel the pull to unfold and be a bit less private.
I happened to bump into Mariesa Bus, an old schoolmate, and she asked to edit a story of mine for a project she was working on in her editing program. All of a sudden someone else was involved in my writing and that alone seemed to open a magic door of productivity. Now we’re working together regularly. Not long later, one of my oldest friends came home for a visit. We were sitting on an old quilt on the beach talking about our lives and then her eyes lit up and I think she might have even clapped her hands and she said “I want to do this for you. I want to build you a website. I’m gonna be the fire under your ass!” And I said, “Okay.” That’s a really small sentence, and might seem like the obvious answer, but there are a lot of times when I would have backed up, smiling, nodding my head in a way that means “I don’t know” which means “no” and I would have come home and opened my journal and written for a while about how I haven’t been writing, and how maybe I should just stop. But I’d been feeling that tug toward something new, the warning that I needed change, so I’m giving it a try.
Thanks to Lisa Garcia for making this website. I see it as a way to hold myself accountable to my writing life. If I’m not alone in it, I can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. I’ll be sharing my stories here, and I’ll be making entries like this one about how my writing is going, or about the place I live, or things I read. This website is a way for me to be more communicative, more public, a little less of a homebody. I see it as a step into the open, and as an offering. If you’re curious, take a look.