Virginia Woolf Birth Date Today

After the January frenzy of prepping for the contest, it's so good to be back to writing again. I've returned to The Light Heart. This book is based on the journal I kept, in three notebooks, on my 1993 trip to India for four months. I've been meaning to write it ever since, and now, house bound due to the deep weather, snow and black ice (And remembering how absolutely hot I was in South India), I've found solace in writing about those magical times.

Sometimes when I write, I go into the zone where the words flow like a funnel through me. I don't know what this state is. Is it intuition? Well, I celebrate and treasure intuition. I consciously honor it yet have no idea what actually is happening. I've been told I'm a mind-reader, yet I have no idea if I am. I know it made my mother mad when I would pop out with things. But she was so deliberately tactful, unlike me always creating uproar with sudden statements, I just chalked it up to the fact we were from different planets.

Where does the the writing come from? I sit at the laptop having no idea of plot or direction, and one by one or phrase by phrase something comes out. Is this stream of consciousness, is it Virginia Woolf, no just kidding. I don't like the term channeling, it seems so dishonoring to me. Dishonoring of our own inner wisdom. But ideas do come, sequentially, often amazing me. Are you ever so moved by what your fingers tap out, that you stop, awed? How did that beauty, that arrangement of words happen.

I try not to think when I write. I know that might sound like I'm an airhead. And I may be. But the first day I worked in a newsroom, it was the Pittsburgh Press, of the Scripps Howard chain, I was sitting at my desk, looking at my notes, hands not moving on the manual typewriter, when an old pro walks by: "Don't Think, Write."

Taking this prime directive to heart, that's what I've been doing ever since.

Happy and peaceful birth date, Virginia.

It's 12:47 a.m. and all is well

I did it. Entered the Amazon Writer's Breakthough Contest at 12:01, January 24 with Night of the Mothers.

It was a lot of work: the edited and proofread 70,000 document of the novel; an author's biography, a pitch on why they should pick my book, a 300 word description of the novel, 5000 words excerpt, and some horn tooting. Now there are four stages, or hoops, to go through but all I have to do is wait for notifications.

It's been fun working on a deadline again. I was missing the NaNoWriMo frenzy until this contest started.

However, not to worry, tomorrow I go back to working on that November novel, The Light Heart, again. It's always encouraging to have another one in the pipeline as you send one out into the world.

Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright Derek Walcot was quoted on The Writer's Almanac this morning: "For every poet it is always morning in the world. History a forgotten, insomniac night; History and elemental awe are always our early beginning, because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History."

Tonight at 12:01, I will enter my first-ever novel contest.