February

I don’t know about you, but January felt like the longest month ever for me. I don’t really know why…or why it even matters…but I have never been more ready to flip a calendar page. Maybe it was officially getting out of “Holiday Months”…maybe it was saying goodbye to the coldest month…whatever it was…bring on February I say!

In some ways, January was a month of reflection for me. I really tried to get out of my head as much as possible and do a lot of heart-listening to figure out where I am going to put my energy…what’s important to me…what’s real and worthwhile. Those things didn’t seem so hard to figure out when it was Jason and I figuring them out together. They are much harder to figure out for myself. It’s so easy to get stuck in my head…spinning in a circle…never able to make a decision at all.

Levi actually nudged me towards one of the big decisions I made. He just started his last semester of high school and is taking a Literature class. I’m constantly asking him what he’s reading…what he’s doing…so excited about this class that he is not excited about at all. Finally, he’s like “Mom you should go back to school if you’re so excited about it”. And then I paused and said “well, it would be really fun to go back to school for creative writing…” I didn’t go quite that far, but I did join an online writing community through The Loft called Lit!Commons.

When I listen to my heart it says “You’re a writer. You need to write”. That is scary for me and brings a lot of unknowns with it. Writing is very personal for me. I don’t know how to write pure fiction…all of my writing has a huge chunk of “me” in it. If you’ve read any of my pieces I’ve posted on here you know that. My writing has changed a lot through the years from coming from a space of pure grief (this is where most of my poetry I posted on here came from) to coming from a space of healing and self-discovery. That is the stuff that is hardest for me to share…and you may have noticed (or not, that’s fine) that I don’t share as much as I used to.

So…back to Lit!Commons. It’s an online format that gives the subscribers access to experts in fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, kid lit, publishing, networking, habit building, coming up with ideas, etc. Each of the experts has a lesson and exercise every week. I can kind of pick and choose what sounds interesting and what lessons I want to do. I can also post them for feedback if I chose. It’s been kind of fun bopping around to different areas to see what resonates with me…so far it’s been fiction and creative non-fiction.

This is one of the pieces that I wrote for creative non-fiction. It’s called a Flash Portrait. The assignment was to describe someone in one, long run-on sentence. It was really fun to do actually.

The One

The One had hazel eyes that met her brown thirty years ago living in the dorm on top of the hill trudging down to go to computer science classes for him english classes for her opposites attracting like magnets until the two became one four years later walking down the aisle making promises of infinite years together and soon they had a little one made from the two a daddy’s girl followed by another one a boy with his mama’s eyes and another one boy two perfect mix of the One and her as they became five and the One continued to look at her with love in his eyes making excuses to brush up against her in the kitchen and he played with the three in the yard teaching them to hit the ball with the racquet sharing the sport that he loved and then one night the headaches started and one day the One and her sat in chairs clasped hands between them and heard the two terrible words terminal cancer and infinity was shattered fifteen months later as she held the One’s hand and counted his breaths rattling in and out of his chest until they stopped and she was left with none.

I’ve also submitted a few different things that I have written to different literary magazines…hoping to get something published someday. So, that’s what I’ve been up to. Embracing my Writer identity and figuring out what that means…and what I say to people when they ask me what that means…lol