About Writing

It seems to me that when I have time to write, my mind doesn’t cooperate and I don’t have a thing to write about anyway. Yet; when I’m busy, I have so much to write about and I don’t have the time.
I’ve been thinking about it because I have been extremely busy this past year, flying all around the country at least once a month and sometimes more often.
I’ve met three great grand-babies in two states, attended my nephew’s funeral, driven my daughter (who lives in Oklahoma) to court three times and then one more trip to deliver her to serve her sentence, reconciled with a sister and a daughter I have been separated from for about ten years, made several long over-due visits to family and my adventures have included numerous miracles.
I also had a miraculous operation on my right shoulder three years ago and I haven’t written about that experience yet. My son survived a horrendous car accident three years ago and nope, I haven’t written about that either. I have so much to be grateful for and yet, I haven’t honored these life altering events in my usual style, writing.
I do carry a journal everywhere I go, especially when I travel and I write quite a bit in long hand, but getting it into the computer and into my blog is the challenge for me.
So, to be kind to myself, I just whisper, “Good writer, at least you wrote some of your experiences down on paper. Somebody will read your journals, someday.”
While that soothes the raging writer in me, a woman driven to write and share since she was eight-years-old, it doesn’t solve my dilemma.
The over whelming task of organizing the thousands of articles, poems and stories that I have written by hand over the last eight years (not even counting the boxes of typed writing in my spare bedroom, AKA, the Writing Room) is my toughest challenge.
I debate with myself about hiding all the notebooks in the house (hundreds) in an attempt to force myself to write on the computer, thus cutting out the transfer task.
I would do it, but I think that I just don’t want to write on the computer anymore.
Strange, because I wrote constantly on my computer from 1990 to 2007. My computer felt like an extension of my hands and it became the writing tool that I used exclusively.
However, my enthusiasm for technology died down somewhere along the way.
I have rediscovered the rush that flows through my veins when my pen races across the lined pages of a new notebook. Perhaps my pleasure is triggered by the smell of the paper or simply by the old familiar style of writing.
As the pages fill, including editorial notes clear to the borders, my pulse pounds in a rhythm that the computer never arouses.
I need to write because words swirl around in my brain until I write them down and not because I chose to be a writer, but because I am a writer.
I started this article to tell my friends how much I have missed writing and connecting with them through their posts on WordPress. Did I mention that I have a very short attention span? On the plus side, I wrote this note on my computer!
We have put our home in Florida on the market and we are looking for a home in New Hampshire. My 14th grand child is due the first week in December.  I don’t think I will be slowing down soon!
Jeanne Marie