Here is another piece I wrote for you! I hope you enjoy. This one is in the second person! Something new for me.
Your Writing Ritual
Every year you participate. NaNoWriMo, to everyone in the know. When you have to explain it, it becomes National Novel Writing Month, but when talking with other writers, who haven’t heard tell of it, you can’t help but feel a certain superiority. How could they not?
All year long you plan ahead, thinking to that one month where you will write with abandon, hammering out as many words every day as you can muster. Bemoaning the fact yet again that you took on this challenge, yet somehow finding the moxie to finish.
This too though comes with its own little mini rituals. You of course can’t write without your proper writing kit. Which has to include your favorite pen, the blue fountain pen, no others will do. Even though at the end of the day you are going to be typing on your laptop in Scrivener. But who can blame you? That pen is lucky! It holds the key to your muse. But then don’t forge that you have to do the writing down in the waiting room at the Mayo Clinic. Sure that sounds strange to many, but there is something about the ambiance to the place that allows you let go of everything else and just hammer out those words faster then you can even type them. It truly is a mystery how a place matters, you just know it does and so you must stick with it.
In those sad times when you can’t go to ‘your spot’ to write, you have learned that you must write at nine p.m. at night. No other time will do. It is the magic moment. You prepare yourself, always making sure you are home by seven so that you can start getting things ready to write. It is a process. You have to pick the right tea for the night, you have to find your writing kit, make sure you have the right snacks setting by your computer, not to mention get your friends on hangouts ready to sit and write with you.
Really, what self-respecting writer does it alone?!? It is imperative that you drag your friends, kicking and screaming into NaNoWriMo with you, of course. They also give you someone to bemoan the word count that you are behind on, yet again. While comparing yourself to that one gal who finished her fifty thousand words in the first week. You just know that she cheated, there is no other way to have accomplished such a feat.
After you have your friends lined up, you go back to your tea and actually go through the process of heating the water, but you do this the old fashioned way. On the stove, in your whistling tea kettle. Pouring it over your tea, you savor the flavor as you contemplate what you are going to be writing about this time. Knowing full well that when you get to your computer and that blank page is blinking at you, the words will never come.
Sitting down at your computer, blue fountain pen at hand, tea steaming near you, and bag of Cheetos in your lap, you gently place your fingers on the keys. Lightly stroking them, waiting for the inspiration you are sure is never to come, but then the impossible happens… words start flowing out of you and you are off, lost to the world of words that will amaze and delight you when you stop and read them. Finding more than double your usual word count in half the time. Wondering what magic has befallen you, thankful your muse was not fickle this time.
Well, there you have it, another piece helping my writing grow! I hope you enjoyed it. Let me know in the comments below what you thought!
Random Acts of Writing 