04 November 2013

Winter: The Time for Home

"Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home." - Edith Sitwell 

 During the spring, I lost my motivation to write. First I just stare at a blank word processor screen. I watched the little cursor blink on the draft of my blog post and couldn't find anything to say. I made excuses about writer's block and came up with reasons to stall the fantasy manuscript I had started penning. 

In the summer, I stopped trying at all. Instead, I spent the days working and the evenings going out for frozen yogurt and meeting up with my boyfriend and attending English literature class at Hunter College. I spent the weekends jogging -- making my way from a measly two miles at 13 minutes per mile to five miles at 10 minutes per mile. Todd and I traveled to Cape Cod, where we biked nearly 20 miles on the Shining Sea Bikeway from Woods Hole to North Falmouth. The sun warmed the skin, the sky blazed a glorious blue, and the fresh air beckoned me away from my laptop.

At the end of August, I hurt my back. I don't know how, but since then I've barely been able to exercise. I've found myself avoiding the chill weather by snuggling under blankets indoors. Today, I realized just how long it's been since I've written anything at all. I also remembered that November is National Novel Writing Month. So I decided to write something, and to keep writing again. Maybe I won't type out a whole novel in one very busy month, but I will at least try to start up blogging again. I don't want to lose the other activities I enjoy, like exercising or eating healthy or making time to read or cooking or planning a trip to Florida or learning or studying languages or clipping articles out of magazines, but I do want to regain my inspiration to write, even if I have to go about it one word at a time. Slowly, but surely, I'll find my way back home this winter.

Excited about my first blog post in about half a year.

1 comment:

the walking man said...

Chris,

There is no such thing as writers block. There is only you feel like it or not. Neither one is better than the other. When you blog it will pop up on my list. So do what you feel.