Here I Go Again

“If you rest, you rust.”  Helen Hayes

I wrote a blog for five years.  Five years!  When I started, I wasn’t sure I had enough things to say for five blogs, let alone five years of bi-weekly, sometimes weekly, blogs.  It wasn’t the writing that I had hoped and dreamed of doing, but to be honest, I never envisioned writing anything that would change the world. So I blogged, as writing practice, and people encouraged me.  Thank you to everyone who read them – they were sometimes good, sometimes bad, and sometimes weird.  Big thanks to my sister, who endured every single one, proofreading and giving me feedback. Special heavenly shout-out to my dear Aunt Margaret who read them religiously and would have nominated me for a Pulitzer if she could have. I miss you.

 Then, I  stopped.  I felt like I had accomplished what I set out to do.  Considering I hadn’t had a plan, that wasn’t hard.  I had wanted to write, and I had.  Now, I decided I wanted to write something different, to focus on fiction.  But I surely underestimated how hard it would be to switch my energy from a quasi-regular rant about life, to the lonelier, higher expectation art of storytelling.

So two years later, I’m feeling rusty, but determined, to… refresh, revive, restart my writing effort.  And it is an effort.  I’m full of insecurity, frustration, and excuses to put it off.  So why do I continue to pursue it?  I’m not exactly sure, but ‘make time for writing’ always appears on my New Year’s goal list.  “Write a scene” is a constant reminder on my vision board, and I prod myself along with encouraging messages in my journal.

write – something. anything
write – do it, do it again
write every day
write outlines
write something bad
make it better
build character profiles
doing it crummy is better than not doing it at all
write it again from another point of view
start over
do it again
write some more

If I’m honest, I haven’t spent these two years stagnant.  I took a creative writing class and was able to cross that off my 2025 goal list.  I was diligent about my homework assignments and have been able to apply things that I learned.  I have a premise for two separate stories.  I’ve tinkered with scenes.  I’ve created characters that I know better than I know my friends.  I’ve purchased many new journals.  (Okay, the journals aren’t really helping me move my fiction writing forward, but I can’t resist a new journal so I pretend it’s a contributing factor.)

My commitment for 2026 is to write.  Good, bad, or indifferent.  Where am I going with this?  I held on to my onceuponawillow site for some reason, and I guess this is it.  So whether it’s a blog, a drabble, a prompt, a scene, or a chapter, I’m writing.  And I’m putting it out here to keep myself accountable; to keep myself honest; to keep myself humble.

I am on a learning journey. Learning about myself, learning about writing, learning about life. And every day, I’m practicing.