Cathy: Joining the blogosphere

Well, Miranda, you have done it. It’s all your fault.

You’ve inspired me to blog.

When my comments are longer than some blogs I’ve seen, I know you’ve gotten me back in the habit of writing. I am very grateful. I have had ideas coming out of my ears, and much to do with mothering and creativity. Also, I find the more I’m writing — or exorcising the daily drek — the closer I feel to coming back to the projects that need the dust blown off of them. Right now my creative attention span is too short for the novels or screenplays and I don’t feel like researching and organizing and editing forty gazillion old poems. But I know I can do this. And if I blog my way out of the day to day, maybe I can blog my way back into the bigger projects. And it beats sitting down to longhand journal three pages a day by a long shot. Hold a pen and a baby? Not able to read it later. Type one-handed while nursing? Time-consuming, but doable. And I do highly recommend Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way for anyone who can get past chapter 7. Not me. Not yet anyway. Writing Down the Bones is much more my speed. I find it very inspiring, and can read it in snippets. Flip it open anywhere, read a page or two or three, and you’ll likely find exactly what you need to get your writing or other creative juices flowing. Natalie Goldberg rocks!

So, this may be it. The beginning of something new, and the pruning of the paths into my brain toward the neglected novels whose windows are a bit cracked and whose corners are a mite cobwebby.

Another metaphor: I’m at the end of the diving board, bouncing slightly and inhaling deeply, waiting for the splash of cold water in my face.

When I was younger, I had this Emily Dickensonian dream of writing away in my little room, and someone coming across the treasure trove of my words after I’m gone. I’m much more realistic — and less shy — now, with a 13 year old who, like his mother, is ‘too smart for his own good’, a 9.75 year old who is the funniest kid on the planet, but not without his challenges, and a nearly 3 month old, who, of course, is the most beautiful, smartest, strongest, etc. girl ever born. Considering this is what I have to work with, besides getting back into tutoring for viable income in the near future, I gotta start somewhere, catch as catch can. Maybe it’ll help others, like all these creative blogger moms have helped me know I could do it, too.

Besides, dear Miss E D didn’t have the internet, and was a tad weirder even, than I.

Splash! The water’s fine