How I’m managing to spend more time on my computer yet less time writing is beyond me—somehow I’ve piddled away hours upon hours this week, but have a no more than a few tidbits of redeemable prose stashed away to show for it. The problem with blogging is that you start looking at other people’s blogs, and then you can’t stop… And if you can’t stop, you don’t ever get to writing, which is why you started the blog in the first place.

Do I hear any other frustrated sighs?

I want to write. Ideas percolate in my head constantly—I rush to get them down on paper when time and space allows. Have you ever tried to dig a pen out from the bottom of your mom-sized purse which sits at the farthest corner from where you are strapped in and hurriedly scribble an idea down before your saturated brain wrings it out all over the floor while driving? On a 2X4 inch tablet? While driving a manual? I’m not a very good driver when I’m merely driving—it has become a bit of a hazard, I must say…

So these ideas make it from these barely decipherable scribbles collected in the bottom of my purse into my laptop and I save them in a file folder labeled “In Progress.” It is next to the “Finished Works” folder. In my “Blog Ideas” alone, there is over 2500KB of space filled with outlines and snippits of meaningless drivel within my “In Progress” folder waiting to be wordsmithed, while a mere 1500KB of complete, finished, and posted works is saved. And the ratio in this folder is actually the best of all of them—poems in progress, essays in progress, childrens’ stories in progress, articles in progress, books in progress. But I need to progress past being in progress.

They call to me all day, for days on end. I long for the few precious moments I have a few evenings a week to curl up with my laptop and shoo away the cats and return to these ideas and breathe life into them. It breathes life into ME. But these moments are, alas, few and far between at this stage in my life. I return to that which is necessary, and my “inner writer” peeks wistfully out of her window, yearning to come out and play.

It boils down to this: I do not want to merely be a scribbler of ideas. I want to be a writer. A writer of paragraphs and pages, not fragments and outlines. I want to complete thoughts and even entire trains of thought. I want to complete something. Some days, I achieve something close to this. Some days, I am “almost” a writer. Most days, though…

Well, most days, I am in progress.

writing