Another Pretty Face

Writing 101 – Day One. Unlock the Mind. Free write for 20 minutes.

Hmmmmm —- It’s not so far from midnight after a rather long and trying day so I hesitate to simply free associate here for fear of publicizing some possibly strange stuff. Probably best to control it with a theme of sorts. But what theme exactly….pets, kids, jobs, my return to writing? Ah – that’s the one.

It used to be second nature to me, almost effortless in a sense. Through years of trial and error, practice and just simply doing it I had developed what folks sometimes call “a voice.” My voice. A distinctive way of expressing myself through writing that “sounded like me” and still met all the basic tenets of good writing. In college The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. was ever at hand. I could even quote from it if necessary. My voice was journalistic, “newsy” and restrained. Correct, Objective, Journalistic.

Later I played with poetry classes and creative writing courses and vastly enjoyed both. Again, a voice developed to fit with what I was writing. Creative, Lyrical, sometimes Quirky.

As I moved into the performing arts my style changed dramatically (pun oh so intended) when I began writing plays and film scripts. This “voice” is perhaps one of the most limited I’ve encountered and at the same time one of the most liberating. Suddenly anything you can visualize, any story which you can show yourself in your brain, is what you are attempting to put down on paper. In a very stringent format.

Intermission occurred. I took a break from writing while I pursued a new adventure called “Raising a Family” and after some time I now find myself coming back around to it. But now I’m worried my “voice” has disappeared. I find myself breaking rules, writing half sentences, beginning with prepositions and ending with dangling bits and pieces. It’s not pretty, I tell you.

So will my voice come back I wonder? That effortless confidence that I had something to say and could say it well? As I tiptoe around here trying a bit of this and a little of that, I worry. Maybe it will, but maybe it will continue to be a struggle. Fortunately for me it’s now been twenty minutes since I began reflecting on this subject and I don’t have to come to a conclusion this evening! Ah, procrastination, I recognize your pretty face.

Free Write Assignment: Completed!

50,000 and Counting

Zero to Hero Day Three – Write the Post that was on your mind when you decided to start a blog.

 

I have more than 50,000 messages in my email Inbox.

Really.  More than 50,000.  The counter actually says 49,999+.  But I’m pretty sure it is considerably more than 50,000. These emails go all the way back to 2008 – the year in which I just stopped. The year in which I stopped doing everything that was not absolutely vital to sustaining life.  Including managing my life……..

Most especially managing my life. 

This ridiculous situation, in which my hoarded emails now strain the seams of my little chunk of the online universe, seems to have become a metaphor of sorts for my life in general over the past five years. The lost years. 

You can read a tiny bit about the why of the lost years on my About page if you like…but the why doesn’t really matter so much right now.  Right now what matters is that I seem to have finally come back to find myself, armed with the realization that it is time to begin again.  

But where to begin?  There are so many choices it is overwhelming.  So the metaphor of the emails seem as good a place as any.   

I’ll let you know how it goes.   

 

Zero to Hero Indeed

Well this is hardly what I would call an auspicious start.

I’m participating in the Zero to Hero challenge at WordPress.com and yesterday I wrote a brilliant first post – or so I thought. But now it is gone. Just gone. I was waiting to publish it until after “sleeping on it” and planned to do some revisions this A.M. But it is no longer within the WordPress Universe and I am, let us be honest here, a wee bit frustrated.

I’ve spent well over an hour reading everything I can find about how to restore posts from auto save and how to find all of my revisions, which theoretically are stored for 30 days deep within the bowels of the WordPress Beast. Oh, how my heart leapt with joy at that news!

But……nothing. Not only does my post no longer exist, it seems that it never did exist. There are no revisions to find. In fact — although I have meticulously compared my screen with the “Help” version of the findyourrevisionsheresillygirl page I’ve discovered that MY version of that screen looks EXACTLY like the one pictured on the Help page with the sole difference being THERE IS NO REVISIONS BUTTON!!!

Ok, ok, if I’m being really honest here I have to say I’m a LOT frustrated right now.

And between the writing of the Brilliant first post yesterday and the futile attempt to find it again today, I have lost about three hours of my precious time which could have easily been better spent watching reruns of Juan Pablo trying to get his fifteen minutes of fame without having to risk saying the “L” word much less proposing marriage on national television. But I digress.

I’ve considered putting in a HELP request or spending some more time “searching” for a solution amongst the myriad options on WordPress or the web. But at this point it seems more logical to just let it go.

Even though it really was exactly the kind of first post I wanted to write; a nice little intro with some smile-worthy humor that set the tone I wanted and explained that I’m here to have fun and learn how to blog and I’ll be writing about lifestyle, self-improvement and random things that catch my fancy (Ooooo shiny!) and while this morning I can remember two or three brilliant lines I can’t for the life of me recall how the original post started or what was in the middle or how it ended…and maybe that is because I wrote it late at night and was pretty tired at the time and I’m brand new to WordPress and this blogging stuff and so I can’t be expected to remember exactly what I was doing, much less the way I was slinging words together…and it’s possible that I am mis-remembering that I saved it at all…or maybe I saved it in that one way that doesn’t really save anything…or maybe I just thought I saved it…and if that’s the case then that could mean that it will never be recovered and so to spend any more time searching for something which doesn’t really exist would be silly and besides I am so tired today that…….Hmmmm.

It couldn’t possibly be operator error. Couldn’t. Possibly. Be.

But you could say that I have nailed the “Zero” part of this challenge really well, don’t you think?

(And the first post I wrote was WAY better than this one. Trust me.)