Time Outs

Heading into the new year, it struck me that the one thing that would help my personal writing is a time out. I'm talking about not doing anything considered productive. Just sitting.

We are taught to keep going. So I hear people undergoing cancer treatments say that they aren't doing enough. As if they aren't in the battle of their lives and need to rest, maybe for the first time since they learned to walk.

If you have created New Year's resolutions and the need to organize, clean or take an extra class is on that list, take a deep breath and put it aside for a moment.

Take yourself somewhere that doesn't look out on the room that needs cleaning or the papers that need organizing, or the book that needs editing. Close your eyes, if you just can't resist list making if your eyes are open. Try just five minutes and hum or count or recite poetry, if it gets your mind off everything you "must" do. This isn't meditation, just a few minutes to regroup.

I'm going to put myself into a time out after finishing this post.

If I don't get back to the blog before 2013, Happy New Year!

Tis the season...to write!

It has been awhile since the last posting, but many months of research and writing for university courses.

Now, I'm teaching myself jQuery, JavaScript, Ruby and SQL. In other words, one of the best aspects of being a writer to me is the ability to create worlds with HTML and the codes above, which make it possible to turn a vision into an immediate visual.

For now, and between class sessions, I want to talk about passions and how those translate into doing what we love instead of watching the clock and measuring our lives by the seasons.

Do we write for the pleasure or to survive? The answer matters because writing should be a passion, not a way to get through a day, a week, a month, a year, to the next vacation or holiday.

The flow touted as a creative nirvana is open to any creative individual who wants and needs to focus on an hour or a day of sheer exhilaration. It's a breath of inspiration that comes only from committing to the vision you have and following it without anticipating where it will lead. If you have ever been writing and looked up to find that three hours had passed and it felt like 15 minutes, you have tasted this creative flow.

So this season, gift yourself with an afternoon at a coffee shop, or bundle up and sit in your backyard, with a pencil, pad of paper, or your computer. If you can let yourself go,  you might rediscover a passion for writing that knows no season or even a reason for being. It exists because you do.