Visit with Kij

[pegkerr]

kijjohnson came up to the Cities today, and so instead of our usual Sunday noon call, we had a nice two or three hour visit. She brought her dog Hope along, and the girls enjoyed meeting her. We walked up to the corner coffeeshop and bought iced coffee for Kij and me and ice cream for the girls, and then walked back home. Kij and I sat on the porch and just talked, about our lives and changes we're trying to make (and changes we want to make that we can't quite figure out). We also talked about our respective books.

I talked about how I've sort of set the ice palace book aside and was finding it difficult to get back to it. I'd stopped because I went back to work full time and so lost my designated writing time. And then I started feeling uneasy about this and that about the plot, and started feeling remote from the characters, and days without writing has stretched into several weeks. "I've come to think that being a professional writer is like being a professional ballet dancer," Kij told me. "Even if you're a pro and have a lot of experience, you have to do your classes every day, because you have to keep your body in tiptop form, just so that when you do it, you can make it look effortless. It isn't like going out dancing at the club once a week, where you dance because you feel like it once in a while."

*sigh* You know what you have to do, Peg. Just like what you have to do with the exercise program that you stopped and you're finding excuses not to start up again.

You just have to buckle down to do it.

Anyway, we talked about ideas about what I can pick up to write again. Will mull over the next few days, and then . . . well, no promises. We'll see.

Comments

[red-queen.livejournal.com]

I forget who it was who said that writing was the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. My own favorite is: Writing is easy. First, you clean behind the refrigerator...

Seriously, I'm a tech writer and sometimes-other-stuff-writer, and it's no joke: I struggle constantly with a desire to do ANYTHING but write. I have a pile of story/poem ideas about which I've done *nothing*, sort of waiting for that perfectly inspired moment. And yet I know --from experience -- that just putting words down on screen or page on a daily basis makes a difference. Sooner or later, you'll have pieces that can become a whole. Or put another way, the infinite number of monkeys in your mind will write SOMETHING. :-}

Go easier on yourself, tho' -- find a way to make a regular writing time something to look forward to, rather than a dreary buckling-down (says she who also struggles for self-discipline and structure against her rebellious, spoiled inner child). Maybe every day will be hard to manage, but a time slot every day that gets used for working out body or words...?