yourpassions.tk

One primary difference between the writing of someone like Sue Grafton and yours is that she writes about Kinsey Millhone, a fictional person, and you write about yourself. Your challenge is to make yourself as real to readers as Sue makes Kinsey to me. One of the main ways she does this is by describing Kinsey’s reactions to events. She has me right inside Kinsey’s skin and head, feeling anxious, smug or delighted right along with her, right down to bodily sensation. In a quest to sharpen my ability to describe feelings and reactions, I recently began paying close attention to the way I’m feeling at any given moment. As I set my mind to do this, I'm thinking about it increasingly often, and I’m becoming aware of a wide range of subtle nuances. Right now I’m feeling gentle excitement about getting this blog written. A couple of days ago I was screamingly frustrated over that website block I wrote about earlier. You may have to stretch to find specific names. I recall a grad school...

It’s time to celebrate a new arrival. For weeks I’ve been working on building a website. These weeks follow a few months of avoidance, procrastination, and other forms of writer's block. Initially I thought I knew enough HTML and CSS (if you need to ask, you don’t want to know) to pull one together in a reasonably short period of time, say a couple of days. Suffice it to say that as I began the journey through my out-dated web editing program, into some open-source freebies, and out the other end into a bare-bones text-editor with absolutely no frills, and concurrently through dozens of pages of on-line tutorials, CSS reference pages, and an actual printed-on-paper book of HTML instruction, I was certain I saw a white rabbit running before me. I lost sleep over links that wouldn’t work, bum style codes, and a host of other problems. As recently as last night, I was ready to throw an ax through my computer tower. “I don’t need this grief! The world doesn’t need this page!” I wailed....

We weren’t the first people on the web, by any means. Our first contact was through AOL, about fifteen years ago. I clearly remember the first time I clicked on a link to an international site. I didn’t even know for sure what I was doing, but suddenly text appeared on my screen and I knew I was probing an electronic brain located halfway around the world, in real-time. That absolutely blew my mind! I could sit at my computer in Pittsburgh and instantly make things happen in Rome. I sat there, shivering with awe at the way the world had just shrunk. Today I click international links several times a week, sometimes without realizing it. The novelty has worn off. But I’m still thrilled when I check the traffic log for this blog and see how many people are visiting from every corner of the earth — it's exciting to see this interest in writing lifestories uniting people from everywhere. And I still get goosebumps when e-mail arrives from strangers around the globe. Today was such a day...

Here it is, late in the evening, and I’ve been “gonna” write a blog for ... I don’t want to think about it, much less write about it! Two days ago I told myself, well, I can let it slip one day. That will be okay. Nobody seriously expects something every second day all the time ... Yesterday's inner voice was much the same. Today I started telling myself, I’ll get it in. I absolutely will get it done. And if I don’t, it’s only one more day. I’ll for sure do it tomorrow . Do these voices sound familiar? I hear the chorus of agreement! It’s not that I haven’t been writing. I have! Just not blog posts. I’ve been writing web page source code. I can do basic HTML tables with my eyes shut, but go much beyond that, and I’m swimming in deep water with no life preserver. I’m writing this source code for the new Heart and Craft of Life Writing site that will appear online, surely by the end of the weekend. I’ve dreamed of having my own website for years, and did set up Ritergal's Story...

“You aren’t listening!” My hubbie knows how to get my attention. Not listening is a powerful accusation! “Sorry!” I reluctantly shift my attention to him. It’s not easy. I admit that I wasn’t listening because I was in my Write Mind. This is the term I use to explain the state of being I enter when I’m engrossed in finding a way to express something intangible. Perhaps I’m trolling the depths of my mind for delicious phrases to describe a person I just thought of for the first time in thirty-seven years. Perhaps I’m searching for adjectives to describe the magnificent sunset I notice behind his head. More likely, I’m trying to think of a way to quantify some intangible concept. Whatever is going on, my Write Mind is a delicious, floaty, totally absorbed state of being, and I like going there. Of course I spent considerable time in my Write Mind as I prepared to write this post. One thought that surfaced was the relative novelty of discovering my Write Mind. This room in my brain, or pe...

I recently watched from the sidelines as acquaintances sorted through boxes of old family artifacts awaiting final disposition. Among the collection of musty old photo albums, letters and other memorabilia were dozens of journals kept by Grandpa over decades. “You are not taking all those smelly old things home!” the wife stated. The look in her eye brooked no room for negotiation. “No, maybe a volume or two as an example,” the descendant concurred. He wasn’t interested in reading them, he explained. They were too dry, too factual. All they contained were weather reports, prices of various commodities, times and dates of meetings, and other banalities. “Now, I’d definitely read them if they were my mum’s journals,” he told me. “Her journals were full of stories. They told what happened. You learn a lot from them.” He elected to take the pile of photo albums home, with the intention of scanning in two or three selected photos of each person. “I can put those pictures in my genealogy sof...

Urgent business calls. The blog is on hold for a week or two, but I'll be back soon. Keep writing! Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal Countdown : 24 more days until the official release of The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing. Advance orders can now be placed at Amazon.com for the earliest possible delivery.

All sorts of scientific evidence is emerging that writing is good for your health, especially the health of your brain and emotions. Sally Balfe reported on a study done by Dr. Robin Philipp showing that creative writing reduced anxiety and helped patients cope with bereavement and depression. WebMD reports a number of health benefits from writing, including relieving post-traumatic stress disorder, stronger immune systems, reduced asthma and rheumatoid arthritis symptoms. The Oregon Health & Science Center recommends journal writing as one of the ways to retain brain function as we age. In an eloquent essay , Esther Sternberg, M.D., author of The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions , recommends writing as a way of reconnecting with past emotions and finding your way to a place of healing peace. University of Texas Professor James Pennebaker, a leading authority on the connection between writing and health, and author of Writing to Heal , offers tips for...