A Haiku for Maggie, Tessa, and Brenna

My muse has gone on vacation, so I simply offer you a haiku:

M'lady please wait
My heart beats only for you
Don't bid me adieu

My entry for the contest here:

A Partial Truth

I do not like to write - I like to have written. ~Gloria Steinem

While not 100% accurate for me, there is a measure of truth here. I do not always like to write, sometimes I want nothing more than to never think about bringing fingers to keyboard again. But I do like to have written something. Something that makes me smile or makes me think or even makes me delete 90% of it and start over again.

Writing, I have found, is not an easy undertaking. Or maybe that's because I'm the world's best procrastinator. I can find 673 things to do instead of sitting down to work on my novel. Including the laundry for our household of six (though to be fair, lately I'm having entirely too much fun using the new washer and dryer).

I want to tell the story(ies) inside of me. My characters beg me to let them out and play, often when I'm trying to fall asleep. But finding the motivation is often the hardest part.

Now, I have a new desk. Tucked away in the bedroom, away from the children and the noise. I will be able to take my laptop back with me and disappear into the minds of those I've presumably created. From now on, I treat my writing as my job, for at least a few hours a day. My story needs to be told and I'm the only one to tell it. My hope is that at the end of a couple of months from now, I'll have a completed manuscript so that I can begin the next step in the process of getting published.

Self Doubts

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. ~Sylvia Plath

Self-doubts. I'm full of those but striving to push past them, to leave them in the dust as I find my wings. It's hard though, when that niggling voice of negativity keeps seeping its way into your head, reminding you of everything you would consider to be a failure.

My hope is to shut that voice up and tell it to leave me alone. There is no room in my life, in my thoughts for the vitriol it would poison me with.

I can do great things. I can do whatever I put my mind to and come out strong on the other side.

I will do them. I will not let the voice of doubt steal away the stories the world needs me to tell. Someday, somewhere, my stories will reach the one someone who desperately needed it.

It’s never too late to be who you might have been.

Here’s a weekend quote to journal about: “It’s never too late to be who you might have been.” – George Eliot

Who might I have I been? Who might I still be? I've had several incarnations in my life, yet I still feel as if I'm searching for the real me. The me I might have been.

In my thirty-six years I have been daughter, sister, friend, lover, wife, and mother. But I'm still searching for me. I wanted to a nurse, then I changed my mind. I wanted to work with children in a hospital, I changed my mind again. I wanted to be a teacher and I changed my mind again. Each time I've assured myself that I made the right decision. I sometimes wonder.

I have areas of interest that call to me, passions of a sort. I never seem to have the dedication to pursue them, to persist in the follow-through.

What I do know though is that it's never too late. So long as I live and breathe, I can make new choices, I can keep searching to find the me that I know inside. The me I really am. I hope that it's sooner than later, but perhaps I will spend my lifetime searching. Only time will tell.