Keeping Up

The last week or so I've set myself a target of one thousand words per day. I actually managed to stick to it, too, for several days, but real life gets in the way. Occasionally you run out of time or out of energy or out of inspiration. Today it's energy - my thoughts are sticky and trickle like tar, each sentence is a struggle, each word a triumph as I grasp it--slipping away like a wet soap in the bath. And yet...yet the urge to write is still there, still as strong and vital as ever. I need to communicate, to set my thoughts down in black and white words. Even when thoughts trip through my mind I am forced to transmute them into deathless prose, changing a brief spurt of annoyance into a mental rant worthy of the stage. Every thing I say, every thought I think is subject to this translation--moving from the spoken to the written form.

I heard once, I think it was in Sister Act of all things, that if you wake up and you can think of nothing but writing, and you go through your day and can think of nothing but writing, and you go to sleep still thinking only of writing, then you are a writer. I cling to that some days, when I struggle with the act of writing, or people don't seem to be paying attention to what I write. Every day I am a writer, because I can think of nothing but writing.