Imbolc                                            Woodpecker Moon

Not often do I trash or put into draft something I’ve written.  I don’t say this because everything I write is wonderful, hardly, but because this blog is as much about living out loud as anything else.  Letting warts and all show through.  Most of us have a wart or two and sometimes it helps to know others do, too.

Still, when I wrote the post below a couple of days ago it felt too raw, as I note near its end. This morning, though, on the way to the Art Institute with Kate, I made a comment about something I’d learned in touring the Art Show.  “It take a lot of courage, bravery, to show up, put yourself out there, let people see what you have, in public.  I admire that about athletics.”

“Yes,” she said, “it’s like that in any area where you want your talents to be seen and appreciated, where you want to be the best.  Like in sending your manuscripts out.”

As you’ll read below, the same thought had occurred to me only a couple of days earlier.

The Original Post – from Monday, March 12th

A good writing day, another verse of Ovid translated, only took an hour, picked up 30 minutes of treadmill time.  A productive day.

Missed the aurora promised by solar storm watchers.  Apparently solar flares and snow storms have something in common, at least this year in Minnesota.

I realized, again, today that I’ve been a coward when it comes to my writing.  I write it, look at it, box it up and put on the shelf.  Right across from where I’m working now, I can see 5 manuscript boxes, each with a different book.  Maybe 6 to 8 years worth of work.  And what have I done with it?  Next to nothing.

Rejections are part of the writing experience.  Well, I solved that one.  If you don’t submit, they can’t reject.  I can’t really say I have a good reason for being so lazy or frightened or reluctant or ashamed (maybe, surprisingly, mostly this one.  It seems my work should, somehow, be more than it ends up being.)  Oops.  There’s that should word.

Not entirely sure, but this one I’m working on now feels different.  It feels to me that once I  squeeze it and press it, making it more compact and at the same more descriptive and dramatic that I’ll have something I can be proud of.

This is a little to raw for me.  It’s going into draft.