New Year’s writing on a bad day

 This year, I will write every day. 

Maybe it won’t be a lot of words, but I will write every day.

Whether on the current WIP (which has suffered a setback; I need a new reason for my big bad not to immediately shoot my hero) or in a journal, or here on the blog . . . I will write.

So why is today a bad day?

First off, I am not depressed. I do not have a black cloud hanging over my head and I’m not on the edge of tears. (I have also not seen a mouse since we came back from a short vacation to Florida). 

Yesterday I had a very bad headache, so I practiced some self-care and took some Advil PM and went to bed early. I woke up 10 minutes into the new year to the sound of fireworks. Many of my neighbors take advantage of any and every opportunity to set off fireworks. New Year’s is no exception. I did not find out until this morning that the Georgia Bulldogs won their playoff game at the stroke of midnight, just as the Peach Drop dropped. Now Bulldogs will be facing Horned Frogs (from Texas Christian University) for the national championship. And although I know which team I am rooting for, I am wondering what would happen if a real horned frog met a real bulldog in real life. (Bloodshed, maybe?)

Today we had church online; the service was pre-recorded and it was funny to see our preacher commenting on his own sermon in the chat room. (He and his wife are in Indiana at the moment because his wife’s father is ill.) 

Today I am also dealing with a bad backache between the shoulder blades. I think my back is getting revenge on me for all the driving we did in the four days of our vacation. We spent probably eight hours on the road getting to our hotel room in Ocala, several more hours the next day between driving to see my mother in law near Orlando, and then driving to our hotel room in Tampa. 

The next day I did driving (not hours of driving, though) when I had lunch with my BFF (she did most of the driving because she came up from Sebring). Then my husband did driving when we went to St. Petersburg to see my sister, her husband, and their daughter. 

And the next day, we spent nearly ten hours in the car from Tampa to home. Most of our time in the Atlanta area was spent crawling in a traffic jam. I was not shocked. 

Yesterday I spent more money than I wanted to buying groceries, but we will eat for some time. 

So I think my back finally said, “No more!” 

I did some self-care by taking an ice pack and lying down for a while; ended up taking a nap. 

Later this evening I will ask my husband for a back rub, probably with Biofreeze. 

It’s the back pain that’s making this day “bad”. But I am determined to write. 

Happy New Year, everyone.

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.

30 years of journals

Stacked in a box and scattered among my bookshelves are various notebooks chronicling over 30 years of my life. 

I have Anne Frank to thank for that.

I've kept a diary off and on since I was 10 years old.  I no longer have the diaries I wrote in as a child and teenager.  The notebooks I have begin at the end of 1986 and continue on to the present. 

I first learned about Anne Frank in the 4th grade.  I don't remember learning about the Holocaust then, although I'm sure Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were mentioned.  What I remember is that there was a girl named Anne Frank, that she kept a diary, and she called it Kitty.  The lines I remember reading in our lesson on Anne Frank are:  "Anne had only begun to write.  If she had lived, her talent would have developed and grown."

When I started my very first diary, it was in one of those five year diaries that don't give you enough room to write in.  I called my diary Beth because Beth was my best friend in the 5th grade.  (I remember one of my entries was about how badly I'd performed in either kickball or softball and I wrote, "Dumb me, I'm bad in it.") 

I started seriously writing a diary in 8th grade and called it Carrie, after an imaginary character of mine that I developed into a book character.  That year that I was in 8th grade, I wrote a book about a girl gymnast named Carrie who went to the Olympics and won a gold medal.  This was in 1976 and Nadia Comaneci was one of my heroines.

I no longer address my diaries to an imaginary person, and I am not as consistent in writing in a journal as I probably should be.  And I don't know what's going to happen to those journals when I die.  I'm not sure if anyone would be interested in my life. 

I don't know what inspired Anne to want to keep a diary in the first place.  She says in her opening pages that she didn't have a real friend and she'd decided that her diary would be that friend. 

Today, June 12, 2019, would have been Anne's 90th birthday.  On June 12, 1929, she was born in Frankfurt, in Germany.  She was four years old, just barely starting to form memories, when her family left Germany and settled in Holland. 

June 12, 1942 was her 13th birthday.  That was the day where she "went to Mummy and Daddy and then to the sitting room to open my gifts.  The first to greet me was you, probably the nicest of all."  "You" was a red-checked notebook the size and dimensions of an autograph album.  In the front, she wrote, "I hope I shall be able to confide in you completely . . . and that you will be a great support and comfort to me." 

She didn't know at that moment what a "support and comfort" that diary would be.  Because less than a month later, she and her family, dressed in layers of clothing and walking in a pouring rain, would enter an office on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, climb up the back stairs to an attic, and not leave until August 4, 1944, the day they were arrested by the Nazis.

I visited Anne Frank's hiding place in 1996.  The longer I stayed there, the more claustrophobic I found the place.  That's when I decided that writing in her diary saved Anne's sanity.  What do you do when you're cooped up in an attic, you can't go out, you're bursting with energy, and the adults in your life may or may not be the greatest support to you?

You write. 

I'm not Jewish and I'm not a young girl forced into hiding by circumstances. 

But it's because of Anne that I write.

Today, she would have been 90.

Happy birthday.

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.

Posting-a-day for May . . .

Today is May 2.  I am in the second day of a "post-a-day" challenge.

Shaunta Grimes, a writer and Facebook friend of mine, is passionate about encouraging other writers to write.  She blogs here and offers material to help other writers learn to write well.

Her challenge this month to her "ninja writers", as she calls us, is to write a post a month and post it at Medium, a free blogging platform.

I've fallen down on my own writing lately, partly because of a busy schedule, partly because of allowing myself to be paralyzed by perfectionism.  I'm in the process of revising a novel, and I'm finding myself freezing up because I'm worried that it won't be "good enough".

Sometimes, my writing just plain sucks.  If that's your opinion about your own writing, or whatever it is you think you suck at, Shaunta's latest blog post should encourage you.  It's entitled, "You Don't Suck.  You Just Haven't Practiced Enough." She reminds us, "It's ridiculous to judge how good you are at something without taking into consideration the amount of practice you have doing it."

So this month, I am going to put some of Shaunta's tools to work for me, put butt in chair, fingers on keyboard, and WRITE.

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.

Family Friday: And THIS is what he was worried about?

Right now, I'm just plain tired of all of the hysteria and fear in the world.  So here's a funny:

I have been working on a novel for some time (a rewrite of something I did back in 2005), and I am TWO CHAPTERS away from finishing a first draft.  (One thing that is interrupting my noveling is doing proofing work that I get paid for.  Noveling doesn't pay anything.  Yet.)

I've been posting chapters over an an online critique group, and I have gotten good feedback from them.  In fact, that's one reason I've kept writing.  They want to know what happens next!

The main character in this novel is part Hopi.  He also is doing his dissertation on the Hopi language.  One phrase (word?) he has taught his wife to say is Nu' umi unangwa'ta, which means "I love you".  

In a couple of places, as I was writing, I just didn't want to look up the word, so I wrote it in the manuscript as [Hopi for I love you], as a note to myself to go check it later. To be honest, I was just too lazy to put it in and wanted to get the writing done.

Well, someone put the following comment on the last chapter I posted: 

I couldn't stand it anymore so I went and looked it up on the Internet! grin emoticon

I said, "Boy, all the stuff I had in that chapter, and THAT'S what you were concerned about??"

I loved it.

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.