NOTHING TO SAY

  It has been over a week since my last blog post. Over so many years my reasons for keeping at it shift around. If it’s not one thing it’s another and they all seem to get lost for a while then find their way home again. If nothing else I write to give me something to do. A few friends and family do visit the site and they wouldn’t if they didn’t care or the writing was really bad. I feel like maybe I owe them. There is a selfish part too. There is nothing like framing language around an idea to nurture the process and I love that part. Until it has been crafted with language, like a potter at his wheel turning clay into pots, you can have experience, even a vicarious, make believe experience but you don’t have a story without words. Creating Story is to my mind what physical exercise is to muscle and bone. Without it you go soft. The more I write the more, the better I understand what I write about but it  also opens the door to relevant, peripheral stuff that slips in without an invitation. It has been over a week.
Still, I have been working on a larger project. Just how long it will be (word count) is anybody’s guess but it is already pushing 4000 words (editing as I go). Slow going waiting on the Muse, I don’t want to overreach the moment. Normal for me is; if I can’t say it in a thousand words I don’t bother. An amalgam of memoir-critique-stream of consciousness-what if-so what and it-is-what-it-is; even with a running edit it will need a major overhaul before it sees daylight. As is often the case it will serve my understanding more than someone other’s reading. Mark Twain said, “If you have noting to say, say nothing.” and I feel right now like he was speaking to me.