Tag Archives: Life

Blog It Up, Writing

* Inspiration!* – Your October Dose of Pep

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A Reminder to Just Keep Writing

I’m taking it upon myself to share some bouts of inspiration with you guys! Every month I’ll post a few of my favorite quotes, photos, and pic-art to hopefully spread some of that (sometimes much needed), motivation to write. If all you get out of this is the thrill of procrastinating another minute before you start, then at least there are worse ways to waste time. Happy Writing!

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” 
― Ernest Hemingway
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“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath,

 

 

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0849ba1ac889a29cf9a896f78e13738d--quotes-about-writing-writing-advice“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A
Memoir of the Craft 

 

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Blog It Up, Writing

When All Else Fails, Write.

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Write when it makes sense. Write when it makes no sense.

Write when you’re dejected and the dam is thick with suffocated vowels. Write when you’ve succeeded; when the good news pours in and accomplishments are ripe. Write when writing is the least of your wants or concerns. Write when you think you’ve deserved to not write. Write when you think you don’t need to write.

Write as the rain falls, then freezes to hail and until that softens to snow and finally melts beneath a bare sky.

Write when you’re sad. When your tongue is weighted by words too bloody with meaning to speak. Write to give them credit, to spoil a wasted plot of silence and make everything real.

Write at dusk, at dawn, within earshot of waves, under a blazing sun, to the sounds of cities and rushing lives. Write when the world spins too fast. Write when it’s slowed to a stop.

Write to explain. Write to distort.

Write for them. Write for you.

Write passages, words, stories, novels, epics. Write to create. Write to breath life into something that’s other. Write to immortalize both fantasy and life.

Write to remember.

Write because it’s right.

Write to taste life twice.

Write because to become a writer is to make, to be astonished by nothing, to celebrate the weird, to pin, to mark, to build, to watch and to collect all life and its maybes with words.

Write to be a writer.

Blog It Up, Writing

My Year Of Writing: A Reality Check

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I’m an infant in the world of publications and story-telling. Young in more ways than one, really. Still small in the world of adulthood and smaller still in that of writers. In just over a year now, I’ve uprooted, reevaluated, reset and reorganized everything – unfortunately for me, in that order.

Looking back, I’m sure that those first few months were direct bullet-points from a ‘what-not-to-do’ list – A verbatim screw up impending foreshadowed from every lifestyle post in existence. So for the sake of all those itching to dive without looking as I did, or even just for the sake of my own reminiscing, here’s the reality of my poorly not planned foray into the world of writing and how you can hopefully bypass my blunders.

The Reality of Uprooting
I’d taken a step that many would applaud, balk at and ultimately praise me as being bold to my face while secretly, and realistically set bets as to when this choice would slap me silly.
I’d quit a job that demanded sixty hours of my life per week so I could pursue writing, but that job had also cushioned that same life financially. With only this vague desire to write still damp with the remnants of a recent dip into the waters of vet school, and nothing but a laptop and a story, I had torn from a system that was definite and comfortable. Peeling away from that job was both liberating and terrifying. The step I had missed here was a hefty one, though.   Continue reading My Year Of Writing: A Reality Check →

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Lessons In Writing: How It Changed The Way I Read

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Prior to this whole publication thing and before my life changed due a visit from the editing fairies, I read books differently. Once upon a time, you could say I read for entertainment – for pleasure, even. But a lot of that changed after that first traumatizing round of editing that my book went through.

Now, I read critically. I dissect narratives and word choices and examine prose like a fiend. I’m a spy now, infiltrating this secret world of successful authors and gathering intel.  Continue reading Lessons In Writing: How It Changed The Way I Read →

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Ink Stains and Paper Cuts

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Writing is an extremely personal experience. It can be raw and naked and embellished with scars of history and lives’ past that bleed and crack against the bars of lined paper. When I began my experimentation into this practice it was in the pages of forgotten notebooks; pages strewn with formulas and highlighted notes torn free to leave 20 of the 200 paged leaflet to home my hesitant scrawl. There were letters penned to friends and family that would never be read, sentences of words laced together that sounded delicious on my tongue and stories. Many stories. Stories that jumped and back-peddled in formats more closely akin to poorly edited essays with jumbled descriptions and themes than anything remotely passable as a tale. I’d shock myself with a paragraph constructed with what I thought was beauty and depth and not have the confidence to continue, so there were constant beginnings but never ends. Words I liked to write and loved to say blotting page after page in a loop I couldn’t divert from. A circle I wasn’t planning to end or escape because this was all so new and freeing and so, so mine.

Continue reading Ink Stains and Paper Cuts →

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The Quarter-Life Crisis. My Experience

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Fear, an anxiety that burrows deep and this incredibly urgent desire to ‘escape’ are some of the symptoms of the little documented, newly prevalent crisis that is sweeping through my generation and most familiarly, within my own social circle.

Even now, as I type this my fellow mid-twenties to mid-thirtyers  are fumbling through this early on-set predicament. And I get it. I know what it is and I understand the anxiety and discomfort it’s coupled with. I’ve been there. When I took off to BC for an undetermined Continue reading The Quarter-Life Crisis. My Experience →

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Searched Far And Wide. Now It’s Real

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Goldilocks wandered the home of the bears, plopping her bottom atop chairs too big and too small, stuffing her face with porridges too hot and too cold and playing mattress roulette like she was a valued customer at Sealy’s. Sure, she may have been dabbling in a high stakes game of breaking and entering in the lair of a family of bears and her particularity verged on fussiness, but her intention was to satisfy a basic desire of ours to just be comfortable.

Never thought I’d say it…but I get it. I get the need to wait; To hold off for that perfect fit.

I started this search over a year ago. A relentless, stubborn, tedious and exceedingly self-severe quest onto myself.

Too big. Too small. Too plain. Too extravagant.

I became real life Goldilocks. But I wasn’t in search of a mattress (although that’s on the list), nor was I taste-testing breakfast gruel. I had this corner of my apartment cleared, found a chair that wasn’t only comfortable but sexy in that way only good furniture can be and daydreamed openly about the better half I’d be setting it up with.

My desk was out there and I was going to find it.

Now, sitting back, with my feet propped beneath its luxuriously finished, glossy top I’m not only the proud owner of a new desk, I’m also finally feeling like a  writer. A real life, bona-fide writer. Well, at least I’m a step closer to that bombshell in my own mind.

As I explored and scrutinized stores throughout Toronto and endlessly browsed pictures online, it became clear that this single piece of furniture wasn’t just a single piece of furniture anymore. It was important. Somehow this new ambition of mine, this new endeavour that demanded the risk of jumping blind, wouldn’t be real until I was working towards it from behind this desk. Investing in it became a priority not just to fill a space in my home, but to make this whole thing an actuality.

I really won’t be a writer until I’m holding a copy of my own, physical book in my hands, but, damn…I’m almost there.

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Don’t Tread Lightly

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Dear ME2.0,

You’re going to be so tired. You’re going to keep being told to ‘take it easy.’ Everyone is going to be concerned because of those shadows under your eyes, and that strange slur in your character that hints towards another sleepless night.

Colds will be countless.
Your immune system will hate you.

You’ll question your ability to formulate spoken words because paper and keyboards become all you know. Emotions and feelings and thoughts separate between life and the string of words you lace together on a page.

You’ll be grateful for the sun on your skin those few moments that you force yourself outside. You’ll still be spewing imaginary dialogue and description in your head, and occasionally speak under your breathe the words of your next page, but at least you’ll only be considered crazy in populated areas.

You’ll forget to eat. Prepare your stomach for neglect.

Minutes slip to hours and you’ll look up and be discouraged by the minimal page count you’ve been able to turn out.

And you’ll be annoyed. Annoyed that you aren’t doing more, although you’re working yourself raw. Annoyed that time has no other agenda then to keep ticking by despite your plea for it to slow. Annoyed that all you wrote yesterday seems ‘blah’ today.

But.

Just ignore all of that. Forget the discomfort, the worry, the caution to ‘take it easy.’ You don’t need to tread lightly here. You’re ME2.0. You’ve been there – Done that. Survived and thrived. So keep striving. Keep thriving. Keep writing. Keep working. Keep doing more than anyone expects or asks or wants. Every minute of it is worth it. Be the you that stretches to the limits. Be the you that doesn’t second guess saying ‘yes’ to another task, another errand, another shift. It’s the best of you that shrugs off the obstacles and embraces the doubts of others and yourself. As ME2.0 you have a responsibility to be more. To be the better and the best. To write without pause and leap without looking. To know that a net will appear if you just trust the fall. So fall. So jump. So tread not so lightly and be amazed.

Love always,

ME (the original)