Weaving The Dream

Okay, this is bad.  This is really bad.  After all I read about keeping my blog up to date and blogging at least two or three times a week, it has been just over two months since my last entry.  Two months!

And every time the doorbell rings (well, it doesn’t, actually, since it is broken) or the phone rings, then I worry that the Blog Squad (Patsi Krakoff and Denise Wakeman, www.buildabetterblog.com) have arrived to carry me off to jail for fraud and failure to follow through.

I could say that my long absence here was due to that rejection previously noted in the last entry but truthfully, rejection doesn’t immobilize me for long.

I could also say that June was the month where I felt like Lucy in the chocolate factory.  For those of you too young to remember that classic episode, she and Ethel take a job on a chocolate production line.  The belt carrying the chocolates moves faster and faster past them until they can’t keep up.  First they stuff the extras in their mouths (every woman’s dream), but then, when that doesn’t solve the problem, they stash them any place they can find—their apron pockets, their bras, etc.  The perfect example of too much of a good thing.  That was me in June.

I barely had time to recover from the excitement of attending BEA (Book Expo America) in New York the very first weekend of June and meeting with a couple of agents and publishers, then I was off to Skidmore College in Saratoga, New York to teach dreamwork at the International Women’s Writing Guild conference.  And let me just say here that if you are female and have ever considered the idea of writing, this conference is the place to be for stimulation, motivation, and amazing friendships.

On top of it all was a huge writing assignment on Empty Nesters for an online magazine, which promises good exposure and reasonable pay, but kind of killed my desire to write anything else during that time.  (I now consider myself, however, an expert on the Empty Nest!)

Then there was my daughter-in-law-to-be’s bridal shower…  You get the picture.

And the more time that went by, the harder it became to settle back into blogging.  And the guiltier I felt.  And the guiltier I felt, the less I felt like writing and the more time went by.  And the more time went by…well, you get the picture.

Of course, the best way to beat guilt and procrastination is to take action.  So here I am.

And the lesson?  The lesson is that any habit, any discipline, any craft, takes consistency.  The minute you fall out of your habit/discipline/craft, you have to start all over again to build up the rhythm, the motion, that forward drive.

So I am kind of starting all over again.  And now that I have, I have ideas and topics lining up, crowding around, shouting, “Me! Pick me!  Write about me!”

Sigh!  Feels good…and I hope this will convince the Blog Squad to give me probation…