It turns out that my intuition is a greater genius than I want to admit. It is one thing to sit around and write a few sentences and another thing to need to desperately wait for my muse to to step in and help me make sense of what I want to say. When did you know you were actually writers? I think I needed to write to feel good about myself. I guess beginners and veterans run into those despair-inducing stretches when the blank age just taunts us. Even my Yorkies seem to stare at me in pity knowing when I bit off more when I can chew. It is hard to keep writing without hope. It is hard to write everyday something original enough, interesting enough that others would want to read me. I guess that is why I often depend on leaving odd and interesting bits from the internet. I'm always desperately seeking my own words. They are always perculating like a pot of tea. It is the waiting that hurts. What do you do in between drafts?

So many of us are afraid to show our hearts. Why do we have to be afraid? What is beautiful is anything can happen when we unclose ourselves of doubt and fear. I've heard it said in all the green world nothing feels as good as when our ideas take on a life of their own and other things outside of it are very secondary, almost irrelevant. When not writing well, I'm not in a deep depression but a kind of melancholy of chaos, confusion and disorder. Where is my muse?

Author Michael Cunninham says "A writer should always feel like he's in over his head." If this is true , I must be a writer. Tony Morrison says something like..."The art of writing itself is in putting my intelligence and my humanity to the best possible use.  I get better because I am doing it. The writing teaches me that I can't just reach some little plateau and say that's it, this is the place." It is always a search for the writer inside her."

The problem for many of us, I imagine, is that writers are not just underpaid but we rarely get instant gratification from our hours of pecking at the computer.  This turns some of us into whiners. I've done my share. I can't seem to get above 200 in my popularity here. I wonder why I keep coming back day after day. I think Tony is right. It is in the search for something that interests me. Hopefully, if my perks interest me, they will interest others who don't have the time to look or are busy living their lives. Maybe, I'm writing for me not you. Maybe, I believe sincerely sincerely, novel writing isn't for me. I have a desperate attention problem as I get older. Unfortunately, I get too tired and too whimpy to write long periods like I use to. It takes a lot of energy, intuition and work. It takes writing our heart. It takes letting go of constrictions placed on us. It takes following our our intuitions.