Ways of Writers

         It's not that I haven't been writing, I have.  Other kinds of writing.  I journal every day.  Well, I want to say every day, but it's not like breathing.  I breathe every single day.  Thankfully.  When I say I journal every day I mean that more days than not I write something in my journal.  Some days I write brilliant thoughts that fill me with understanding of myself and the world around me.  Some days I basically tell myself what I did that day, hoping that another day I can remind myself that I did something other than breathe.  It's important to me that I do something every day (actually)  in addition to breathing.  And sometimes it's important that I remind myself about those things. 
       Besides the journaling every day (in the special definition), I have, since January first of this year, written a haiku every day.  I have actually accomplished this.  Like my journal entries, the haikus vary in depth and complexity, but they never (so far) stand as chronicles of what I did on a particular day.  I must confine my idea to seventeen syllables, and a listing of my daily doings takes more.  I must be more clever in my use of words, no rambling, when I write my haiku.  Often I think about the haiku when I take my daily walk (and now I'm back to the use of daily in the sense of journal writing, not the sense of breathing).  I started this because a friend proposed a challenge.  She said she was going to challenge herself to write a haiku a day for 2014 and did anyone else want to join?  At first six or seven of us decided to go along on the journey.  I thought it might be a New Year's resolution I may actually follow through with if I had some encouragement.  From five or six, the place we post has now grown to over 200 people.  If you build it, they will come.
     I have been also doing quite a bit of writing, and here I am using the sense of bit as a piece.  This kind of writing occurs in the revision of my manuscript.  In this case I have revised Base Ball: Coming to the Show.  It is, after all, baseball season, so a baseball book is appropriate to get out there in the world.  Revision is another part of writing, a necessary part.  But it is slow going.  Not only must I focus on the gestalt of the story, but on chapters, then paragraphs, then sentences, and words. The way I write stories, in bursts of words that somehow flow along like leaves in a river, is the opposite of the painstaking work of revision.  But, slow and lumbersome as it is, I love it as much as the word bursts.  Now this bit completed for this book, I'm on to the next.
    Since we last connected, and apologies for my absence, I also finished writing a first draft of my new novel What the Women Carried West. I'm excited about this work as it's an historical fiction novel and I love history. Not to say I'm not excited about my memoir, or my baseball book, or my haikus.  Or, you know, I might even be a bit excited about my journals. And, I'm excited about revision.  I am just a friggin' ball of excitement when it comes to writing!
   In this new novel,  I was involved in research as I was writing, and this is another part of writing.  Notes.  I have written a lot of notes from many sources as I completed the writing of this manuscript earlier this year.  And now, well soon anyway, I'll be starting on the revision of that work and the shaping of the initial burst of story by revision. I'll need to refer to those notes, likely scribble a few more notes from the notes, and then fold them into the story.  More writing.
     Over the past few months too I've attended the AWP in Seattle and found it a wonderful experience.  I renewed some friendships, made new ones, made my way to the top of the Space Needle.  I think this deserves its own blog.  I also plan to return to the Mendocino Writers Conference this summer where I'll work on short story writing.  I've also got notions of flash fiction writing.
    That about gets you, dear readers,  up to date in the where in the hell have I been department.  As I was writing this I was reminded that I've continued to stay focused on my writing, except for this blog.  I'll not judge myself too harshly for this omission, for heaven knows as writers, this is one of our collective downfalls.  We all need to be a lot kinder to ourselves in that regard, as well as in general. Thinking of all that goes into being a writer and all of the different areas in which we write, is a start for a collective group hug or high five. And I have to be present for that.  I will. I am now reminded: Write. Write? Write!  See you tomorrow.