This month's awesome co-hosts are: Lee Lowery, Juneta Key, Yvonne Ventresca, and T. Powell Coltrin!
This month's optional question: What was an early experience where you learned language had power?
This is a big question. I had to think a while about it. I know I talked very young, but I was never a talkative kid (nor adult!). I also still have stories I wrote when I was five years old. I cannot ever remember not being in love with reading. It was my escape, my joy, my inspiration.
While I can't think of a particular time when I was that young, later on in my childhood, I started writing short stories about The Kingham Kids. (It was the group of children I grew up with in my neighborhood. We lived on Kingham Road!) I'd draw the title pages and write silly adventures that always ended in a terribly cheesy joke. The other kids would always gather around me, eyes wide and eager, and listened to the stories. They loved them. Later in life as adults, a few of them told me that those stories were one of the bright moments in their hard childhoods, and with the aid of my imagination, I helped them escape cruel realities for a little while. I knew they loved the stories, but I had never known just how much they meant to them.
The power of stories never ceases to astound me.
This month's insecurities: I'm doing a lot of things... just not writing. It's driving me bonkers that a story hasn't snatched me away and driven to write. So much is going on away from the computer, and then when I get online, all I seem to do is try to catch up on things.
I think I need to clear my metaphorical desk and sweep away everything so it's only the word processor's blank screen and I. I'm going to take a blogging break for the summer (end of May through August) and ease back from social media. I won't completely disappear, but I want all the stuff that seems to pile up on me out of the way. I'm a writer, and my number one responsibility is to write.
There will still be a few promos and guests are most welcome here. I'm always happy to help out other writers.
What do you do when the words aren't coming?
