My alarm was set for five a.m. but I was wide awake before it went off. I hadn’t slept much because I was too “excited”—excitement being what I’ve decided to call anxiety—about my live interview on Canadian morning television. My publicist had booked me on what she called “the Today show of Canada” to talk …
Last week I had a disturbing realization: I forgot to write my blog. I typically send it out on Wednesday or Thursday and it was Saturday before it even crossed my mind.
I’ve been sharing a blog every week for nearly three and a half years. There have been times when I’ve had to skip a week here or there, but that has always been a decision.
A few years ago, I went to hear author and now presidential candidate Marianne Williamson speak. She was describing a conference she held on race relations in Los Angeles. She said that tension was rising in the room when a white man stood up and angrily addressed an African-American woman.
“We’ve heard about all of this injustice again and again!” he yelled. “This is not helping anything. Why can’t we move on?”
I don’t usually include photos in my weekly blogs, but this you just have to see to believe—at my house, we have been living in a sock crisis for months. How does this relate to your writing? The excuses you make about why you can’t find the time, or why your stories don’t actually matter, or how it’s fine to let your project limp along as a scrambled, disorganized mess, those have to stop.
So you want to write about your life, but let’s face it—you’re afraid to share personal stories that involve people you know. Your experiences are populated with your loved ones and this is what’s stopping you. You can’t share your story without including the good, the bad, and the ugly, and those can come in the form of friends and family.
How do you write the truth without alienating your entire social network?
Several weeks ago, on my way to my yoga class, I noticed an elderly man pulling weeds in his front yard. He was kneeling on a paper bag, working his way slowly through what looked to me like an impossible task.
Because the yard was nothing but weeds. And the house itself, in my ungenerous opinion, was a sort of weed, with sad, faded blue paint, a sagging front porch, and a sidewalk that was crumbling and cracked.
Since the publication of my memoir last fall, I’ve been reunited with my first love—fiction—and it feels so…..good. Mostly.
It also feels daunting and overwhelming and fills me with uncertainty and doubt.
But I believe ideas have their own timeline, and that, when we pay attention, we see tiny sprouts of magic when the time comes to begin the novel, or return to the memoir, or noodle over a poem.
It was a brand new, emerald green Schwinn 10-speed bike. I was thirteen years old, and I’d never owned something so beautiful. The paint sparkled magically in the sunlight and when I rode that bike through the neighborhood, I sparkled too. I rolled easily through a landscape peppered with unhappy parents, mean girls, first crushes, and bad skin with my hands up, nothing to hold on to and, in those moments at least, nothing holding me back.
If you know me at all, you know that I like a good dose of woo-woo in my world.
I believe in following my intuition, prioritizing my spiritual practices, and recognizing divine messages. This is the lens through which I find inspiration and make decisions. It’s also, to me, a way of having fun.
I’ll admit, it’s an odd form of fun that can show up in strange ways.
As I was staring at my blank computer screen this morning trying to decide what to write, I decided to check my email, because, you know, checking email is always the answer to being more productive.
In this case, my answer was right in front of me. My friend Kate sent a message asking for some blog writing suggestions. Since I love to nerd out over the nuts and bolts of writing, I thought I’d share my 5-Step Blog Blueprint as a guide for keeping your own blogs personal and to the point.
👉 Enjoy dedicated writing space just steps from Lake Michigan
👉 Benefit from one-on-one developmental editing sessions
