Making use of useless moments...

This past week. It was one of those well-planned, fine-tuned, sequence of days that ended up in a flat, chaotic chord. Meals were planned, lists were made - even lists for each list! Groceries purchased, laundry done, bulk of cleaning complete…all ready for a week of company, arriving Monday evening. The only things left on the lists were setting up rooms - you know, fresh sheets on the beds, candles burning (to cover any unwelcome scents), newly laundered towels hung in a clean guest bathroom…Instead of greeting my company, playing hostess-with-the-mostest, on Monday night, though - I was laying on a very uncomfortable hospital bed with an IV in my arm, admitted, and ready to roll to my "room." Although I did get out of the hospital while our company was still visiting, beach and pool trips were replaced by doctor's and diagnostic appointments.

Lovely, huh?

Company plans aside, it felt like the entire week was a series of useless moments - a waste of time and energy where I could get absolutely nothing productive accomplished. (Unless you count racking up medical bills, steady strides to hitting that out-of-pocket insurance max, and reading the first page of "War and Peace" at least 10 times as being productive? (By the way - "War and Peace"doesn't mix well with anti-nausea and pain medications, especially being the first page does have a decent amount of French mixed into the English!)

But…were they really useless moments? Every life experience, each new venue visited, all of the new faces gracing the characters around us…all of it can be used in writing. Although I would never attempt to include this past week in personal memoirs (the memories are too hazy and laced with emotion to be accurate), I can make use of the setting, the personalities, smells/sounds/tastes, the emotions - all of it, in any scene that a character might be hospital bound. I suppose I have entirely too many hospital memories, with all the above accompanying them. However, no two were ever alike. (Unless you count the three times in the hospital while having babies - those were fairly similar, only the players looked different as the years passed.)

I penned this today, before beginning a self-made writing assignment. I do this - write out what may only be useless words, strung together…but, occasionally, they end up gracing the pages of a story, as well. :)

           Blinking in and out of a hazy consciousness, she could hear the syncopated screeching of the monitors attached to her chest. The scratchy fabric of the hospital gown fell loosely around her frame, an open-back reminding her that modesty was not a commodity where she now lay. Nausea mixed with hunger as she reached towards her aching stomach.

            “Try to hold still,” an unseen voice instructed.

            She felt a pinch in her arm and the taste of stale saline entering the veins of her right arm. As warmth encompassed her body, she shut her eyes again, pretending to be anywhere but there. Hospitals were like prisons to her. Locked behind the key-card doors, strapped down by IV poles and heart monitors, incessant noise and lights bombarding the senses.

It says "Beauty", pulled through the white with charcoal, accompanied by a dead dragon-fly. I suppose it my "artistic" way of making use of what might be useless - a re-used canvas and bug that my daughter found outside on the ground.

A journey into the writing world...

So - here it is - nearly a month since my last posting! To say life has been crazy would be a gross understatement. Some of it has been my choosing, but mostly - not so much.

This sums it up - head in the dinosaur's mouth?!

I have been waiting for one day, ONE day, to pass without some sort of drama - whether injury, sickness, trauma, or emotional upheaval - ONE day to come and go without something derailing life. Today is already shot - but maybe Thursday will break the 29 day streak? 

Enough complaining - onto the crazy of my choosing! Writing. Deadlines. There were many. Honestly, though, what should have been a foreboding forging of words, finger strokes on the keyboard, ended up being a much needed refuge from reality. Leaving the chaos around me, I could slip into another world, alive with characters requiring creation and settings to observe. For those hours (or moments - unfortunately motherhood doesn't come with a "pause" button, rendering children independent and without some constant need), I could travel far away from the disaster bombs exploding around me. 

All that (finally) leads me into the topic titling this blog entry - A journey into the writing world. I have plans to discuss publishing in an upcoming blog, so the journey I speak of isn't about that. It is the oftentimes slow process of getting to that point. I have discussed editing, extra readers' eyes and ears, and a plethora of other things concerning writing - but this is about "putting it out there." Blogging, for instance. It is a bare display of our thoughts and words - the way we say things. I have been writing since I was old enough to hold a pencil and poorly spell words, but I rarely showed anything I wrote to others. I suspect some of that was due to privacy and the desire to freely put pen to paper, without fear of who might read or judge. As a child, poor topics and designs can be chalked up to being, well, childish. But for the adult? Not so much. I had no problem with sharing thesis papers in college - they were topical, focused, with a purpose. There were criteria that had to be met, specifications. Creative writing is very different, though. It is what comes from the soul - all mistakes, misconceptions, quirks, and the likes included. Again, bare. Blogging was my first attempt to step outside my comfort zone, revealing words and thoughts to an unknown audience.

Next, the world of writing competitions and submissions to magazines. Those were the deadlines I mentioned. Two poems, two short stories, one narrative non-fiction, and one novel, to be exact. Being these only accept unpublished stories, I decided to submit something different to each one. I truly enjoyed the challenge and flexing my mental muscles of creativity!  

If you are interested in finding out more about upcoming competitions, the Poets & Writers website is a great place to start. Their calendar link is: https://www.pw.org/submission_calendar

Blogging, competitions (with obvious hope for catching the eye of some readers), and publications in magazines, even small ones, all create a writing portfolio - more importantly, a public one - something that will be a useful tool for publishing!

So - are YOU ready to step outside your comfort zone?

(Sorry, Shane, but this was the best picture with a skeptical challenge look that I could find! :) )