I did it!  I wrote for 28-days in a row — first thing in the morning.  Like I said before, the public accountability certainly helped a little, but really, I just wanted to do it.  I love setting small goals and accomplishing them.  And a 28-day goal seemed completely do-able.  And it was.

I am as you might say, a bit of a cynic at times.  I thought I would do this little “exercise” 1.) to make sure that I stayed focused on something that has something to do with writing and 2.) there’s a tiny little off chance that something might come of it.

Well, put egg all over my face because those pages were magic.  All 103 pages of long-form, hand-written pages.  I’m glad that I didn’t do the quick math in my head on day 1 because the thought of filling 84 pages would have been too much.  So, I only thought of writing three…which turned into six.  And there were a few more days just like that.  And as I counted my filled pages last night, I couldn’t believe that I got passed 100.

I did just as Julia recommends and so many of my first words were about how grumpy, sleepy, and inconsolably frustrated I was at our cat.  But somehow as my pen kept moving words would string together to form thoughts that I didn’t know I had still swimming around up there.  A lot of it was just processing my dreams.  I’ve got crazy vivid dreams (which I love).  But somewhere around day 19 something clicked and a story began to form.  Something I have been processing in my personal life started to take shape in the form of a story — a bit of creative non-fiction (with heavy emphasis on the fiction).  But stranger still is that I was developing this story with vivid images, scenes if you will.  I kept bouncing from scene to scene.  It felt shaky, raw…like I was standing on fishes.  On day 26 the hubs had to almost pull my journal from my hands as he ran around the house frantic that I had only 10 minutes left to get ready for the day.

And that my friends is the sweet spot — getting lost in time and space because the words are pouring out.  What I wouldn’t have given to just continue to sit and write for hours more.

If I am honest, I am fearful that it is just a spark, one that will not turn into a flame.  However, I am somewhat afraid of that flame.  And afraid that I will put it out. I want to face it and find the courage to continue this creative pursuit.

If there’s one thing that I’ve gleaned from this, it’s that these morning pages seemed to have freed me from my usual “paralysis by analysis” and that I would like to keep my hand moving.

Painting: Cy Twombly | I really resonated with these thoughts on Twombly as written by Claire Daigle, “… we see Twombly’s invocation of myth and poetry, his wavering between high and low and his sustained dwelling on the threshold where writing becomes drawing or painting. Perhaps most importantly, we see in this painting how marks and words – in collaboration and counter-distinction – construct meaning differently. As John Berger has written, Twombly ‘visualises with living colours the silent space that exists between and around words’.”