I’ve written to express my feelings, thoughts and ideas since elementary school.  I did crazy stupid things with my writing like in 8th grade I listed every single guy in the entire junior high school that I even remotely had a crush on and then added it to it in front of some really snarky girls in math class one day who grabbed the list from me and teased me mercilessly.  The good thing from that experience is that I wrote my very first poem about the 8 headed snake called gossip.  Bless my heart.  I also learned NOT to write down lists like that….and if I did…to certainly keep them well hidden!

I know that a couple of my good friends and me during our freshman year in high school wrote absolute tomes to each other in the way of notes.  What the hell were we writing about and why did we think that someone else would be interested in seeing what we wrote? Nevertheless, it was a way to get our thoughts on to pages and pages and pages!

I don’t remember writing a whole lot in high school probably because of the “list” trauma from 8th grade and the fact that I lived in a dorm full of girls. I kept my writing to myself. Then in college, I started back up again mostly in the form of my own version of slam poetry and usually after a few glasses of wine.  Throughout my twenties I kept books and books of poetry that I wrote.  Some of them were “false starts” until I got the sputtering of words out of my system and a really great poem would just fall out of my brain through my fingertips on to the page with some kind of cohesion. I still look back on those works and know that something else was working through me.

It wasn’t until my thirties that some friends and I realized that we were all writers and so we formed our own kind of writing group.  We supported each other in our processes. One friend had been published but could almost not bare for anyone to see her writing. Another friend was so good at seeing situations and reading people but getting the words down into a cohesive form was even more painful for her.  There was a core group of three of us that met consistently for fifteen years with various people joining us and leaving.  I am still good friends with one who joined us for a little while and then left because our group wasn’t really focused on writing at the time, we were more focused on working out our issues and she wanted to write!

I learned so much about my writing self in this process.  I never thought of myself as a novelist.  I’m astounded by really good writers who write reams of pages in the form of multiple books.  For one thing, I could never figure out how the authors kept track of all the details.  So when one of the group members began working on a novel and brought her notebook full of details to our meetings, I loved watching her process and seeing that, for her, putting together a novel was much like working on a patchwork quilt so that all the pieces were special (and not just the whole end product).  I also learned that I really like to do the kind of writing that I do–whatever this is that I am doing right now–and that it was always a good idea for me not to compare myself to my other writing group friend who wrote expository writing with so much flair and deep insight about what was going on with the people and situations she observed.

I’m glad that the powers-that-be inspired me to blog 365 blogs in 365 days because for the first time in my life it is helping me to be consistent with my writing. Now each of my blogs may be very different from the next and my writing may drive some people crazy because there doesn’t seem to be a focus….but I assure you there is a rhythm to this madness!  My intent is to help other people see themselves and what is possible and to have hope for their future through my being open about all kinds of processes!

For the longest time I wanted to be some kind of an inspirational/comedian speaker/writer until I watched an episode of Dexter recently on Showtime. Dexter is about a “good” serial killer who channels his need to kill into killing other serial killers.  This season he has stumbled upon a nest of serial killers who have banded together and it looks like their leader is an inspirational speaker.  I guess the speaker does not have much if any humor in his speeches so that should be the first clue that something is off but this whole idea has put a chill to my wanting to be an inspirational/comedian speaker.  I think I’ll just stick with writing for now….

Writing, writing, writing.  It’s something I’ve always had a need to do and have been looking for a structure to write within, for right now, blogging is a great way for me to do it.

How about you?  What’s inside of you that you have been waiting for the right place and time to allow it to unfold?