This will sound ridiculously small an act, but I’ve been doing this for years now (a decade?) and it seems to help. I have a Base-Lock Rubber Type kit with tiny letters (think linotype) and on one line I keep the word “write.” I keep a paper planner, and each year, at the start of the year, I get out the stamp pad (some years black, some years purple, with no apparent logic) and stamp that word on each square in the planner, so the word “write” accosts me every day. (It helps that this planner is the way I keep track of everything, and yes, I’m still wed to paper. And yes, I spilled water on it one year and it was sobering, but because I usually use pencil, it was not as devastating as it might have been.) Each day that I write something, I check off the word “write.” Each day that I don’t, I draw a line through it. There are plenty of lapses, days at a time when I haven’t checked off the word, but somehow this small practice keeps me accountable to myself. And when it happens, it feels really good to have a week with more checks than lines marked through. (For all of us, may there be many more such weeks, this year and beyond.)
-
Search It!
-
Recent Entries
- The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson
- Drag it to the curb!
- This Book Is Anti-Racist by Tiffany Jewell
- Another chance for CROOKED HOUSES from Egaeus Press!
- Happy new year (& here’s to good news in 2021)
- The Grief Forest by Laraine Herring
- The problem with thinking
- Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson
- 2020 workshops and coaching
- short story published in CROOKED HOUSES
-
Links
- Arnold Adoff and Tracy Staggers: Poet And One Woman Band
- Bernadette Murphy
- Candace Kearns Read
- Chris Tebbetts
- Climbing Poetree
- Cyndi Pauwels
- Diane Baumer
- Divyam Chaya Bernstein
- Elaine Gale
- Fred Marchant
- Gayle Brandeis
- Have Son, Will Travel (Holly Hudson)
- Jim Krusoe (Wikipedia)
- Kristin Walrod
- Lynda Barry (The Nearsighted Monkey)
- Marly Youmans
- Mothers of Invention
- Museum of Jurassic Technology
- Page Meets Stage
- Robert Freeman Wexler
- Sanity Creek Sock Monkeys
- Tara Ison
- Taylor Mali
- The Eyeball Kid
- Urban Baby Bonnets
- Vines, Wines, and Lines (Mark Rich)
- Whitney Bell