Sunday Salon

You may be noticing some changes on my blog - the new header,which is a picture I took myself with our digital camera of visitor to my garden this past summer. I have planted a butterfly and bee flower garden deliberately, and this was the first time I saw the Monarch butterfly on the butterfly bush! So I grabbed our camera and this is the result. I was and am so delighted! "If you build it, they will come." No wonder Field of Dreams is such a powerful movie. You have to picture it, imagine it somehow, before it can come into being. And I want to feed the butterflies and bees.

Which all provides me with the next change: Sunday Salon. I have long been admirer and reader of this book forum, and finally took the plunge last week and signed up. So here, as I start my second year of blogging, I'm going to begin writing about books and what I'm reading, on Sundays.

And wouldn't you know it? The very first blog I went to on Sunday Salon, had a post on writing! Exile on 9th Street, a new blogger to me, posted about the writing life and creativity here.
What I want to talk about, from his post, is the book he brings up - Write Free, Attracting the Creative Life, by Rebecca Lawton and Jordan Rosenfeld. It sounds like a feel-good book about living a creative life, as Exile says, new-agey. But what he is discovering in it, has meaning for me: 'What’s the book about, you ask? It’s principally about how to a attract a creative life through positive thinking. But it’s not just thinking you’ll be a writer that the book proposes: it proposes action and resolve. It helps writers, or any creative person for that matter, focus on what they want by writing down their desires and acting on them.' As some of you know, I am a writer also, and I wrote my first draft of a fantasy novel over the last several year, concentrating and finishing the draft by last Christmas. Then I put it away. Last night, at a party for a friend's birthday, I encountered members of my old writing group! I hadn't seen most of them in almost 20 years. So, they asked me what I was doing, and I told them about the book. Today, I made my mind up that it's time to get back to writing. I've had enough time off and away from creating. I copied out the section from Exile's blog because for me, focusing my desires and acting on them has always been fraught with anxiety for me. Not that I can't do it, more that I am afraid to know what I want, because then I would have to go out and get it. And I'm scared of that. Is it just power? Is it the possibility I could have everything I dreamed of? The thing is, I am not far from having a really good life I like. What I don't have is a strong creative section set aside for myself, and that's what I need. I've been seeing this year, I think, if I need to write. and I always come back to yes. Because I enjoy writing, I enjoy creating stories, I like writing about ghosts and magic and people. There is a power for me in writing that, a sense of being connected to a deeper river of life around me. I want my life to have meaning. It's that authentic self stuff again, I know! I think I will get this book and, as I feel some anxiety in answering questions about what I really want, I also know that is where I've hidden away from myself something that I need.

Sadly, I read one Stephen King story in Everthing's Eventual today, I'm trying to finish the book tonight so I can start on Lonely Werewolf Girl tomorrow. I'm enjoying Everything's Eventual, but I can't shake the feeling that I've read all the stories before, yet I can't remember when or where I was! It could be whole deja vu thing, but it doesn't feel like it!

I hope you have had a good Sunday catching up on reading, and whatever else you wanted to do this weekend. If you know any recent good books on writing, please let me know about them. I am going to get Natalie Goldberg's new one soon, as well, which Andi at Andi Lit has been writing from over the past spring and summer and sounds wonderful.

From good writing comes good reading. The best books are written with passion, and so are the best lives lived. That's what I aspire to! (There. I said it!)

by the way, my old writing group did invite me back; I don't know if I am ready, mostly because they write hard science fiction, and I write fantasy, which was the reason my friend Jennifer and I left in the first place! (She writes fantasy also) We actually were part of one other writing group, and then it all fizzled out. This was all in the late 1980's, fresh out of university and starting life..... They are a lovely group of writers, and I might go back for a visit, in which I will let you know how it goes! I think though, that this blog and the blogging writing community functions as my writing group that I need right now. Mostly I just need to sit down and get writing again. Now that I am reading more, it's time to balance with writing again.