Writing Excerpts – May 2, 2016

{ Little Wing, (Fiction) Rejection, Writing Perspective }

Welcome to Week #13 of my writings! This week I cannot even claim “almost daily.” I’ve been picking up a few more temporary working hours out of the home. Good for the wallet, but exhausting. I am seriously in awe of those who hold full-time jobs, have families, blog, AND write all kinds of amazingness on top of it all. I’ll be happy next week to get back to regular half-time working hours. That’s my happy medium.

Note: This series of Writing Excerpts was originally inspired by this post and Jeff Goins’ My 500 Words challenge.

4/26/2016

(Little Wing)

I usually write in the morning, but decided to try an evening session today.

I just read a tweet by @ArdeliaMLee asking what our favorite poem or poet was, or was that not our thing? My immediate reaction was “Little Wing” by Jimi Hendrix. Poetry set to music, with lyrics that I could actually remember and sing to my son as I rocked him to sleep every night those many years ago. I couldn’t remember a nursery rhyme for the life of me, but for some reason I could sing “Little Wing” over and over again. Poor kid — mama does NOT have a good voice. *LOL* That’s one of my most vivid memories from when he was a baby.

Poetry doesn’t speak to me unless it’s set to music. But oh, man, set words to music and I can lose myself for hours.

So I listened to lots of music, wrote lots of things I won’t be posting, stayed up far too late, and my hour of music ended with Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” Although it’s one of my classic favorites, I have to say I never remember singing that one to my little guy. 😉

4/27/2016

(Rejection)

Today she chose to reject her current life. No more would she be subject to the fears and expectations that had ruled the first 50 years of her life. She supposed some would call it a midlife crisis, some would call it a mental breakdown, some would call it being a selfish bitch.

On that note, she looked at the photos of her family, wished them happiness, and walked out the front door. A new life was waiting for her.

* Now I know why so many books about life changes are written about middle-age women. The first time I wrote this, she was 35 years old. Then I realized that her children would be young, possibly very young. That wouldn’t work unless she took the children with her. The situation she was leaving wasn’t dangerous, but the mental restrictions were something she could no longer live with. However, her children were old enough to choose and fully embraced the lifestyle.

4/30/2016

(When the writing is difficult)

What do you do when the writing just doesn’t work?

I’ve had a blog post in my head for a couple of weeks that I’ve wanted to write and fully intended to post yesterday. I’ve written it out several times, edited it, scrapped it (pages and pages burned in the woodstove), rewritten it from scratch, and it’s still crap. Is it because I want it to be perfect? Is it because I want it to be more important than it really is? Is it because I keep reading other bloggers’ posts and want mine to be different, but maybe I’m really just trying to say the same thing and I hate that? I’ve lost all perspective.

Yeah, I think I’m just not good at telling others what to do. In my head, I can look at someone’s situation and think, “Why don’t you…” — but there’s no way I’m going to say anything out loud. Which could be why people like to talk to me. I’m really REALLY good at listening.

So then I thought I would continue writing the stories of some of the excerpts I’ve posted over the past few weeks. I started writing out questions about the characters, plot, etc. — and I realize that I’ve completely forgotten how to assemble a complete story. Once again, I want my stories to be different. It seems like so much of what I read is exactly the same storyline, just characters with different names. Which is probably because that sort of thing works… why do something different if the basic story makes money, right? And yes, I do want to make money from my writing… but wow, do I have a lot of work to do!

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Are you writing anything this week? Post a link, I would love to read it!