I’m traveling this morning. Blogging is likely to be even more sporadic than usual for the next few days, but I intend to put stuff up here, even if it’s just photos of interesting stuff and snippets of what I’m writing.
Warm-up words from the plane…
I’m a writer. So? Write.
It’s not that easy. I mean, yes, I can pour words out, and sometimes they fall in pleasing patterns. But I’m a lot of other things that aren’t a writer, and those things get in the way. Mostly, though, what gets in my way is me.
I’m not complaining. I like writing, and I like being a writer. I like the control of Indie, far more than I’d like tossing my babies to feed the fires of Moloch and turning my back on them. I like research, and writing gives me the excuse to do as much of that as possible and when people ask ‘why exactly do you have texts on medicolegal death investigation, Russian folklore, and Eastern Art on your table?’ I can give them an answer that seems more sane than just ‘I have a curious mind.’ And writing comes from reading, so I can buy books and justify them because they are feeding the writer side of my brain. For a girl who was once told she read too much, that’s a nice facade to have.
And for now, sitting in a gently rocking airplane seat with my feet stretched out, crossed at the ankle, while I nurse a ginger ale and contemplate the cookies I was just handed, I’m writing about the present, excited about the future, and remembering the past I never lived in. We were talking about food history on the drive to the airport, you see. It reminded me I’d like the chance to do more research on food, but then I remembered I’d planned to spend this trip writing in every spare minute. So I pulled out my Bluetooth keyboard, synced it to my phone, and started writing down what was falling out of my head. Because I’m a writer, but if I don’t discipline myself to actually write, it’s very easy to fall down the rabbit hole endlessly researching, reading, and dozing off instead of recording words on paper, even if they are useless warm-up words mostly intended to see if I can make myself write on the Tiny Setup. Which I can, although this keyboard is still a touch small for my hands and I typo frequently.
My other goal this trip? I need to break down my inhibitions about dictating story. I badly need to break that invisible inner wall that keeps me from using a tool to achieve my goals. (Foals? Really, brain? Ok, yes, small horses with knobby knees are amazingly cute and distracting. Sigh. Worse than kittens, really.) But if I can’t overcome this strictly mental impediment, I’m not going to manage to keep writing the way I want to. This year of twenty eighteen has been bad, in terms of writing production. In life, though?
I’m more than a writer. This year I became a Scientist in actual title. My husband and I bought a house, and moved. My second daughter graduated from high school. My second and third daughters both started at college. My husband transitioned out of one job and into another. My mother moved most of the way across the country to be nearer to me. The year isn’t over yet. I’m on the first leg of another adventure, and the Holiday season is coming. 
I write through the filter of all of that, and perhaps because of those experiences adding flavor to the stories who make it past all the obstacles, they are made better. I don’t know. I just know that I want to continue to be a writer. So. I write.
Comments
8 responses to “Writing on the Go”
Yup, writers write.
With respect to dictating: at first, it’s clunky. Don’t worry about that part. I started a couple of years back, and I got to the point where I reached fluency (ALWAYS needed proofing, though!) and then my headset hardware broke, and I didn’t have the scratch at the time to buy another one.
Biggest issue for me was privacy. If I’m using the keyboard, and somebody goes into the kitchen, no intrusion. If I’m dictating, though, it’s a hassle.
Have a lovely trip, and eat some things that are local specialties, and eat ONE thing, and think, “THIS ONE IS FOR PAT” and I’ll send you PayPal to cover the price, if you describe for me how it tasted.
Sometimes the mechanism of getting the words down is a rut to be overcome. I’m old enough to recall my first writing experiences. Sitting at a PC and using a program to write was uncomfortable, as compared to a pen and paper. Now, I OWN dictation software, but haven’t leapt that uncanny valley to be able to use it. My first attempt at doing so was maybe a decade ago. I suppose an additional attempt will be fodder for a NYE resolution.
If your dictation software is a decade old, you’ll discover that Windows’ own voice-to-text is just as good or better.
I have the latest Dragon stuff – installed but yet unused.
Interior shots of CVG? I haven’t been through there in a long, long time!
CVG has changed a lot in the past decade. They finally tore down old Terminal 1 and Terminal 2, and after it ceased to be a Delta hub Terminal 3 concourse C was demolished as what had been Comair went away, leaving all airlines using Terminal 3 concourses A and B. For the past couple years it has also played host to a whole bunch of exhibits from the museums at the Cincinnati Museum Center (former Cincinnati Union Terminal) while that Art Deco masterpiece was undergoing major maintenance and renovations which has just completed.
That would explain the skeletons, I suppose. I grew up in Southwest Ohio, but my main experience with CVG was transiting through there on the way to San Antonio on business. It’s been years since I’ve really spent any time in Cincinnati since living there for a few months in the late 80s. Kind of miss it in some ways.
There has to be a way to adjust the size of the keys on my smartphone keyboard. The resulting typo rate wastes way too much productive time and good temper.