The curse of the white screen.

I am really happy to be finding my groove this week.  This was the first full week of school for both kids and so the first example of what my life will be for the next 9 months or so.  I like the rhythm of it.  There is plenty of time to run errands, take care of the house, write and still get to work without being late.  I am chronically late everywhere I go, I have no concept of the passage of time!

The only issue that I have had is that I would sit down to write and all of the swirling tornadoes of words and stories would disappear and leave me with a blinking cursor on a white screen.  Luckily, I have been putting my non-writing time to good use and reading lots of things on creativity, writing and building a career as an author.  So I took a piece of advice and looked through old files of stuff that I had written a chapter or page of and got lost in one.  I had forgotten that I had written it, loved what I read and then kept going.  It was cathartic because I felt like a loser with my blank screen but discovered that I had written the beginning to a rather kick ass story.  Go me!

One of the things that struck me was that I could feel that I had written this character from a moment of screaming frustration.  I didn't plan her or ask myself questions, I just pictured this apologetically bad ass warrior of a woman and started writing.  You can see the fact that I got caught up in the story and probably growled at anyone that tried to stop me from typing.  All of my best writing is like that.  The thing that I try to be aware of and train myself for is that not every story will come  to me that way.  I am painfully aware of my newbie status and hope to build the discipline and skills as a writer to craft a story even if it doesn't carry me away in a storm of awesomeness.  I don't want to burn out or give this up when it's not fun anymore.  So I have stored up a mental database of things to keep me writing and have become a big fan of BICHOK.  It's a very good starting point.

So I am off to write about a werewolf and his tree sprite.  Or maybe a pink haired warrior woman.  Whatever it is, I'm already Butt In Chair Hands On Keyboard, so it's time to rock a story!