The Ready Writer

I've been thinking a lot lately about creative nonfiction - and that's probably due to the fact that for the first time in 7(?) years, I have been inspired by people.  Real life people. I took my first creative nonfiction class in community college because it was a term I had never heard before.  How on Earth could an essay be creative? But it opened up this new world to me, a world of memoir and a level of thought that I needed and ended up thriving on. the first creative essay I wrote landed me a spot reading in a swanky art gallery surrounded by middle aged, well dressed academics drinking wine (which was, and still is my measurement of success). I continued taking creative nonfiction as a writing major at Southern Oregon University. I got A;s, I was told I could easily be a biographer or a memoirist, or essayist writing for any number of journals, and yet, for some reason, I stopped. I attended Grad School where I studied Library Science, not just because I wanted to b...

So on Election Day (or the day after, rather), I expressed the thought that I may have to scrap my main project because of my villain. I have since decided against that. I think now more than ever, I need to write this story. I am going to make some pretty big changes to the story.  I'm taking out some of the fantastical, making it less traditional apocalyptic horror and more occult horror.  My villain will be less of a political ruler, and more of a religious one, that was able to take over the government, and instead of doing it from multiple points of view, I'm picking one character to tell the story from. However, I still think that this story will be an important one.  I'm separating it from my original idea, because honestly I don't know if I can write it.  It's not that I don't want to, or am too scared to create a political rift, but I just don't think I'm strong enough.  This election is a very emotional one for me, and I'm already har...

So you'll notice in Monday's stats blog that I won't have a lot to write about.  I haven't made a lot of progress. I've hit resistance.  I won't call it writers block for a lot of reasons, but mostly because I HAVE ideas.  I have good ideas. But I've hit this type of resistance before. You see, I've been trying to write a novel forever.  I remember starting to try to write novels in high school, and then for various reasons, I kinda gave up writing all together for a few years, and then fell back in love with it when I transferred to Southern Oregon University.  But, I gave up novel writing.  I wrote (and still write) short stories.  I've published short stories, I make money (sometimes...very much sometimes) writing short stories.  I'm good at it, and for a long time I gave up again on the idea of writing a novel Until I went to library school.  I guess being around all of those novels, and talking about novels, and helping people fi...

I'd like to take some time here and chat about WHY I write and how I came about being brave enough to call myself a writer. I've been writing my whole life.  I remember writing stories as a young kid.  I had Barbies, but rather than play with them, I would dress them up, and then write stories about them.  I was also in love with dinosaurs.  A lot of my stories revolved around a paleontologist type character (who just so happened to resemble me...a lot) who somehow brought dinosaurs back to life and was friends with them. Later, I wrote angsty teen fiction and poetry, which isn't unusual for most teens, and was often a reflection of the types of things I was feeling inside.  Writing was therapy. Writing was a hobby.  Writing wasn't a job. I wanted to be a paleontologist, a counselor, a teacher, a librarian.  I never wanted be a writer.  Being a writer wasn't a real job.  But it was always something I did.  I took creative writi...