Category Archives: Writing

About Why I Blog

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It’s been over a year now since I started writing this blog. In some ways, it feels like a silly thing to do, spending a couple hours a week working on something that just seems to dissolve into the blogosphere – time I spend beating my brains and the keyboard into submission when I could be reading or Netflix-ing or even doing something virtuous, like cleaning the bathroom.

Although I started out with two posts a week, I have fallen into a much more comfortable once-weekly posting schedule – not onerous and yet, strict enough. I hesitate to break this chain, even if it means resorting to filling up this space with old material that I still find amusing, in spite of the fact that I wrote it myself, some of it nearly twenty years ago.

And so, in honor of the ninth month on the calendar, my favorite, here are nine musings on why I blog:

  1. As I have already alluded to, chains are hard to break. While sometimes quitting something can be seen as necessary to further other goals, blogging is still working for me. It keeps me writing a minimal amount, even if that is only editing and formatting.
  2. I like being a blogger. It gives credence to the idea that I want to be called a writer. I write, therefore I Am A Writer.
  3. If I didn’t blog/write, then memories and thoughts would slide into oblivion. Case in point, when I re-read old columns I used to submit to the Vermilion Standard, that I now re-publish here sometimes, I am surprised by what I forgot – things that I don’t want to forget. Like funny things my kids said or I how I felt when the Twin Towers went down.
  4. I believe in the power of individual memory. While one person’s diary can primarily reflect a single experience, it can also shed light on the experience of the collective. Anne Frank, while writing from a teenager’s perspective, memorialized the experience of many more than just herself and her family hiding from the Nazis in World War II Germany.
  5. I haven’t really publicized my blog enough (#goals) on Instagram or Facebook (even though I have intended to since I began this blog), so I have a very tiny subscriber following. However, the occasional comment I receive or the in-person discussions about my latest post with a reader keeps me in touch with people that I talk to often or rarely. And human contact, especially for introverted writers, is GOOD. I like the conversation.
  6. I find that writing on a computer is different from writing by hand in my journal. I am able to capture ideas faster. Sometimes the tactile-ness of the keys seems to move me forward, keeps me going. Sure I could write on my computer other than the blog but the blog keeps me minimally accountable, keeps me coming back to the keyboard.
  7. I write to find out what I think. It never fails to surprise me that what I start out with is almost never what I end up with. It’s become fun to see what happens when I follow the bread crumbs I leave scribbled on the blank index cards I’ve learned to keep nearby: Mr. Dressup, Ukrainian weddings, the worst jobs I’ve had and what I learned, Winnie-the-Pooh and why I love children’s literature so much. (All possible forth-coming posts.)
  8. Blogging is a great challenge. I’ve learned (and continue to learn) a lot about blogging and setting up a website. Learning new stuff is SO GOOD for the brain, both old ones and new ones. And things that I said I would never be interested in (like promoting myself on social media) now don’t seem so heinous. It’s just part of the job.
  9. I want to leave something behind. This may be the most important. In many ways, this blog is part of my ongoing quest to leave behind a personal and family history. And reading about keeping personal memoirs, I have learned it all counts: the marginalia written in favorite books, handwritten recipes with annotations, the indecipherable script on the backs of old photos. And of course, personal diaries, journals and blogs.

I think I will keep going.

About Writing: One Year Later

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There are two ways for me to look at this last year of blogging: it has been either a complete success or a total failure. How I choose to look at it could be an illustration of that classic conundrum: is the glass half empty or is it half full?

Or, is it neither of those things?

Perspective really is everything, so let’s look at it first from the glass half-full side of things. I DID NOT get as much accomplished with my writing as I had hoped in this past year since I started my (second) blog. Because the blog was supposed to be my side-thingy, my practice space, my other writing project.

This is the assessment of someone who writes admittedly unrealistic to-do, to-read, to-write, to-learn, to-visit, to-cook, to-go, to-knock-out-of-the park lists. When I compose such lists, I have endless resources in my estimation: all the time, ambition and money necessary. And then reality hits that ALL of those things are finite: I HAVE TO CHOOSE how to use WHAT I’VE GOT. Half a glass is plenty to get me where I need to go. It can get me to the bathroom, if that’s where I want to go, eventually.

To flip things, my half-full glass was a lot. A year ago, I was trying to figure out what kind of blog I wanted to write, what the heck were widgets and plugins (in blog-speak) and how to get over the fear of just putting my words out there into the blogosphere (a.k.a blogophobia.) Frankly, I’m still trying to figure out those things.

And then, there’s the simple fact that for the last year, at least once a week, I posted something to this blog. When I hear about the discipline of someone like Seth Godin who posts every single day, I’m humbled in my efforts. Sure, his daily posts are super short but any kind of regular writing simply requires: 1. ideas of any calibre; 2. actually writing the ideas and; 3. coming back to the keyboard again and again and again.

I haven’t yet become an no-day-without-the-line kind of writer (which I have resolved to do on at least one of my to-do lists) but 52 weeks times about 750 words is…well, it’s a book. So bravo, Bon. It’s only a novella, perhaps, but some of my favorite books – The Little Prince, 84 Charing Cross Road, The Wizard of Oz, The War of Art, Animal Farm – are just teeny-tiny but they have a pages and a front and back cover and I bought them without any qualms that they weren’t what I thought they were: a book.

But maybe, just maybe, this last year of writing has been something else. Not pee in my glass, exactly, but certainly not what I expected. I mean (said in a Monty Python voice): NOBODY EXPECTS A GLOBAL PANDEMIC. And if I was not writing my blog, I probably would not have reflected on it as much as I did – at least not for public consumption or in any coherent way. I would never have written about George Floyd or a letter to Santa Claus or about Clarence the TV Dog.

So what is this other thing? It’s a glass, of sorts, a receptacle, it’s a ball diamond in the middle of a cornfield. If I hadn’t built it, I wouldn’t have come to the page week after week. Maybe I haven’t knocked it out of the park – yet – but at least I wrote about it.

And I can let that be enough.

About School Lunches

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As I try to carve out a writing life, I’ve begun to follow a lot of prompts. Not prompts as in my stomach growling to remind me to have lunch (purely, hypothetical – I never forget to eat lunch) or as in a notification from my phone telling me to stop surfing Google working and get up from my desk and move around. I’m talking about journaling prompts – the kind you can find in lists on Pinterest or that comprise whole books. They can be reasonable (‘Write about your first diary. What did it look like? When did you get it? Why?) and sometimes inane (Imagine you are an elven maiden. What color is your dragon and where are you going on vacation?)

There’s a couple of tremendous things about following such prompts – even the vacationing-and-dragoning-elven-maiden ones. First of all, they are an excellent practice in faith for a writer. I have found time and again, as I follow said prompts, that I am surprised at what comes out on the page. What I write is almost always further than I can think. Meaning that if only I have the faith enough to sit down and write, I will take myself to a place, an adventure, an idea-mine that I couldn’t conceive fully just in my brain-space. Now that I’ve sort of learned that (I still resist inanity sometimes), I am more excited than ever to sit down at my desk and just write. It’s a great way to learn who you are deep down and to find out your capacity. (And what color is your dragon.)

Secondly, prompts can be especially helpful to dig up old memories. Many times, I have heard someone say – I just don’t remember anything from when I was a kid! Open-ended questions like ‘Tell me what it was like to be seven years old’ will only cue blinking eyes – and a blank page.

Without a structure or a spark, it’s hard to remember something in such a specific time. And who cares, anyways? This is not a court deposition and (hopefully) you didn’t murder anyone. Instead, prompts work best in a general way. In my very favorite book about writing – Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird – the author tells her class (and her readers) to think very small. She asks them to write about school lunches.

When I ask my boys what they remember about school lunches, they remind me of pots of pasta and sauce and cheese, tortilla pizzas made in the toaster oven or “snack-y” lunches with crackers and cheese and veggies – because we homeschooled them and they got a (almost always) homemade lunch everyday and ate it while they finished up their math homework. Or while discussing what color their dragons were.

School lunches do not conjure up warm and fuzzy feelings for me. School lunches may have been on the Top Ten List of Why I Wanted to Homeschool My Children in the first place.

So here for your entertainment is my take on What I Remember about School Lunches.

When I think back to school lunches, the first thing that comes to mind is the smell, the weird closed-in, lukewarm-food, old-lunchbox smell that inhabited my lunchbox whether there was food in it or not. When I squeeze my eyes shut, I remember a purple lunchbox with some past-cool or never-was-cool character on the front. Sometimes my mom used MacTac to cover up the picture, to try and “new-it-up” if it was a hand-me-down from one of my siblings. I don’t know who I wanted on my lunchbox instead, maybe Barbie or more honestly, the Muppets, but I never got them.

I probably had a lunchbox all through elementary school. We didn’t have lockers on the ground floor in Derwent school, so our lunchboxes would line the shelf above the coat hooks, our boots on the slanted shelf below them. The noon hour bell would semi-release us – we were free to go fetch our lunchboxes, but had to remain at our desks, eating our baloney sandwiches and pretending that eating with our enemies was normal, hiding any offensive item (like soup in a thermos) from public view and openly consuming chocolate bars and bags of potato chips to advertise that our mothers did indeed love us.

My favorite sandwich would have been a hot dog ensconced in white homemade bread that was slathered lightly with margarine and mustard, the whole thing wrapped, then twisted up, in wax paper. Baloney was a close second, the flatter version of a hot dog that it was.

There was always fruit. An apple, usually, which I never ate and never felt bad about leaving in my lunchbox for mom to shake her head about when I brought it home. She probably left it in the lunchbox, hopefully, unrealistically, for the next day. A banana, if not too bruised, was welcome. Sometimes there were plums, three of them, when in season, and I would eat those, especially happy if they were slightly green. Sometimes there was an orange, the Christmas, easy-peel kind, the kind we called by a politically incorrect name at the time. I would happily consume these, unless, alas, mom had mistakenly fallen for buying oranges with seeds. If I ingested the seed, unaware, I would reject the entire orange as soon as the seed hit my mouth, and it found the recesses of the garbage can outside in the school yard where we were allowed to finish our lunch once the first 15 minutes of the noon hour went by.

By the time I got to junior high, my mom capitulated to packing my lunch in brown paper lunch bags, with the unspoken stipulation that I was to return them for re-use until they were un-useable, unspoken because, well, Mom. While I hadn’t graduated to packing my own lunch (or ever did, even in high school), I started to like what mom packed for me a bit more, or she figured it out a bit better. Tomato sandwiches with mayo and salt and pepper, though soggy, were acceptable. So was Cheez Whiz. More sophisticated things arrived in the bags as I got older: granola bars and sometimes doled-out plastic bags of potato chips which hopefully would not be reduced to crumbs before I got to them at noon.

Okay. Your turn. What do you remember about school lunches?

About A Month Later

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It’s been officially a month since we moved into a smaller home and I have to say: it’s been a busy one. Here’s my one-month recap in no particular order…

  1. Packing, moving, unpacking and ALL that goes with it really can mess with a person’s good intentions. Hence no blog post AT ALL last week. I told myself that I was taking spring break, maybe because the weather was so nice? But then, right smack dab in the middle of the week and despite the near-zero temperatures on either side of Wednesday, we got a blast of minus 30. It was just one day but I got to wondering – was that my fault? Did my smugness about the weather produce a smackdown? Oops. For insurance purposes, I have decided to get back to my two-blog posts a week. If March comes in like a lamb, you have me to thank. You’re welcome.
  2. My bookshelves are still in flux. (See above.) Because, reading emergencies besides, organizing my books is just not as important as work and sleep and feeding ourselves. (Oh, and Amazon Prime as we take our near-daily dose of re-watching The Mentalist from the beginning.) But also, I am trying a new thing with my books – shelving them by color. I’ve always filed my books in a particular order that allowed me to easily track them but author/podcaster Anne Bogel of What Should I Read Next? inspired me to go this crazy route. Crazy also because I’ve always been someone who kept the jackets on the books and now that I’ve removed them all, I don’t recognize any of my books anymore. It’s like going to a family reunion with amnesia.
  3. Remember how we cancelled Christmas? And New Year’s? And basically the first couple weeks of January because everyone around us (but not their dog) got sick? Well, Family Day weekend we had a do-over at my sister-in-law’s with turkey and taters and games and some general holiday hanging out followed by turkey sandwiches and two Oiler wins to boot. A very merry February Christmas indeed.
  4. My article Mom in the Driver’s Seat came out in the February/March 2020 issue of Our Canada magazine. It feels good to get some publishing traction again. But it also was good to remember the story of my mom finally getting her driver’s license when she was well into her fifties! I knew the story, but her grandchildren didn’t. (This is why we need to tell stories.) What a testimony to keep doing hard things even as we get older and “the things” get harder.
  5. I finally got to see the new Little Women movie with my dear friend Rhonda in a quaint little original theatre in Vegreville. Living 40 miles apart, we have no qualms about meeting anywhere within a hundred-mile radius for some good story telling like that, especially if Meryl is in the lineup – and she is the best Aunt March ever. And bonus: Rhonda introduced me to a gem of a restaurant in Veg: Loco Burro Fresh Mexican Grill. Yum. Go eat there now.
  6. And speaking of YUM – we used a gift certificate last weekend with two of our boys for a restaurant whose very name made them happy: MEAT. It was a seriously fun eating experience (not to mention the food was DELICIOUS) and our server Andrew6167 made it even better. (Thanks for the MEAT, Sydney! You always know the best places to eat!)
  7. Strathcona is such a fun place on a Saturday night and after our MEAT, we walked down the back alley and then piled in with all the other late night fans for some Made By Marcus ice cream. The. Best. Ever. Ice. Cream. Ever. Period.
  8. We went to Vegas in Vermilion with our good friends Cliff and Caroline (THE MAYOR) McAuley which was hosted by the Good Life Institute. A fancy meal followed by some fake-money gambling – but the chips made it look like the real thing. The highlight of the evening for me was hanging out with the group of senior ladies that hired Len’s Party Bus to ferry them to and from the event! What a fun bunch!
  9. I went to the Inspiring Women Conference in Lloydminster and was…well, inspired. My favorite: the panel session with Canada’s first female professional chuckwagon racer Amber L’Heureux, silk artist Bonny MacNab and the first female CEO of Lloydminster & District Co-op Leanne Hawes. Not to mention the keynote with Carrie Doll, brilliantly timed just when the afternoon sleepies want to hit – but Doll kept me very entertained and interested. She has a great story and a great podcast, The Inner Circle, where she gets many other Edmonton locals to tell their stories.
  10. My husband and I are enjoying a blast from the past as I am re-reading the Harry Potter books out loud to him every night. We started reading them aloud as a family in 2003 so a revisit is long overdue. We’re just getting into The Prisoner of Azkaban – Large Marge has been deflated and Harry has escaped the Dursleys for another year. Yay Hogwarts!

Okay, I didn’t know I did that much stuff. What a fun re-cap! See you Thursday!

About Dave Barry

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I’ve mentioned before that growing up, my family always got the daily Edmonton Journal newspaper. It was a different experience getting a daily newspaper in a small rural town, over 100 miles from where it was published. The paper would arrive late in the evening on the Greyhound bus and Dad would pick it up the next day. It was literally yesterday’s news.

But although we would already know the top news stories (my family being avid listeners of talk radio and watchers of the evening news) there was plenty more in the Journal to round out our reading. For me, it was first the comics. Then it was the Lifestyle section. The Lifestyle section is where I first discovered syndicated humor writers like Erma Bombeck and later, Dave Barry.

Dave Barry, like most humorists, has a great deal of intellect behind the silliness. He earned a bachelor degree in English and then was hired as a journalist which opened the door for his humor column to get published and then he got syndicated and then he got a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. (So, I guess I like some Pulitzer Prize winners after all.)

I fell in love with Barry’s nonsensical and hyperbolic style the first time I read him. For instance, here’s his take on the Christmas season:

“Once again we find ourselves enmeshed in the Holiday Season, that very special time of year when we join with our loved ones in sharing centuries-old traditions such as trying to find a parking space at the mall. We traditionally do this in my family by driving around the parking lot until we see a shopper emerge from the mall, then we follow her, in very much the same spirit as the Three Wise Men, who 2,000 years ago followed a star, week after week, until it led them to a parking space. “

I think Barry’s magic comes in being relatable. The subjects he exaggerates and pokes fun at come with not a small nugget of truth. We were at THE MALL last weekend and were summarily stalked when we went to drop off some packages in the car. This was followed by the screeching of tires as the cars honed in on other prey when they realized we weren’t giving up our spot just yet.

And take for instance, one of the many fiction books he’s penned, The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog. Last weekend, after we left THE MALL and all the Christmas shoppers (and parkers) behind, I finished reading this book out loud to Rick as we travelled the two hours home. Barry tells a story that strikes a chord for nearly everyone: it’s got dogs, death, church, puberty, bat poop, a Christmas pageant, a high-strung Christmas pageant lady and to top it off, the hero, probably modelled on Barry himself, actually saves a damsel in distress. Not only does he serve it all up with plenty of humor, he can make you cry, too. You have been warned.

It’s not a long book to read and it nicely sets the stage for Christmas. It’s probably sitting on the Christmas display rack at your local library right now. There’s something about this time of year that makes you want to feel all the feels, which is why those dang Hallmark Christmas movies are so popular. So tune in the Yuletide Log channel and snuggle in with a good book like this one instead. It might be a little predictable (like a Hallmark Christmas movie), but maybe that’s just one of the things we like about Christmas.

About Pain and Limitations

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I hurt my wrist last week.

With Remembrance Day falling on a Monday this year, my usual exercise class was cancelled that day. My trainer texted me that evening and offered me a make-up spot in her Tuesday morning class. Since I regularly go Monday, Wednesday and Friday, this meant I would do strength training two days in a row. Which usually spells trouble for this body.

As tough as I like to think I am, there’s nothing like Heather’s Boot Camp to show me: Oh, I’m NOT.

I mean, I do okay but I’m nothing like the poetry-in-motion that Heather is when demonstrating a new move. Performing her routines run the gamut for me from: I feel awesome! I’m knocking it out of the park! to What fresh hell is this? My execution can be more like a limerick than a sonnet on the poetry scale.

Any time I make the mistake of agreeing to two of her hard workouts in a row, I wind up in just a little more pain than I bargained for. I’m not talking about general exercise soreness – I’ve been at this long enough to have moved past that. It’s more like me standing at the foot of the stairs wondering how to convince my knees to bend again.

Except this time, it’s my wrist. My right wrist. Operator of all happy things like pens and can-openers and hairbrushes. It never before occurred to me how important the wrist is to the fine-motor skills needed in pinching and grasping. Administering my daily morning eyedrops? Nearly impossible with my right hand. Lifting my coffee cup to my lips? Excruciating. (I’m not talking about physical pain: I nearly spilled my coffee!)

And may I go out on a TMI-limb here and mention how important a strong wrist is in the act of wielding toilet paper? Yeah, it’s a thing.

Lucky for me, the state of my wrist is not affecting my ability to poke at a keyboard. But it does send me down that rabbit hole of thinking: What if I couldn’t write anymore, via pen or pencil or laptop?

This very painful scenario was demonstrated to me the week before in my writer’s group. That evening we pulled individual prompts from an envelope, which we would have twenty minutes to write about and then read aloud for the group. One of our older members gave an exasperated sigh when she drew: Write about something you can’t do anymore.

Sitting across from her, I noticed that as the rest of the group was scribbling away nonstop, she was writing very little, and nothing that looked like full sentences. When it was her turn to reveal her prompt, it was suddenly clear why: old age had caught up to her and what she couldn’t do anymore was hold a pen and write. We gave a collective groan, understanding that the act of holding a pen and scribbling was an integral part of feeling like a writer.

But.

Does not being able to hold a pen change the fact that she still is a writer? No, it does not. She admitted that she can still use a keyboard. But neither implement is necessary to write. A person could “write” by dictation or by videorecording if conventional options weren’t available.

I have struggled with calling myself a writer, especially for the years when I was writing very little and mostly for myself. But I’m slowly embracing that label as I have come to understand writing as part of my identity and not necessarily what I do.

That being said, while I am able, sore wrist and all, I need to act on that identity and write. Even if no one reads it. Even if it hurts. Even if it’s just a blog. It’s all writing and it all counts.

About My Little Boys

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My sweet boys: Tim, Simon and Gil circa 2000 – sorry about those L. A. Kings pjs, Tim 🙁

[Welcome to Throwback Thursday here on the blog. In honor of my last post where I talked about the newspaper column I used to write (and also in honor of weeks that disappear due to our fiscal year-end), I am gifting you, dear reader, with a re-print of one of those old columns. Disclaimer: some of the opinions and word choices of 2001-Bonnie are not those of 2019-Bonnie.]

Led by my oldest son, the three little men in my house have suddenly developed a fascination with the female gender. At three, five and seven, they aren’t exactly ready to date, but the five-year-old has been proposed to, and has accepted.

What appears to be so interesting to them is the idea that girls are not only different physically, but in other ways as well. Besides the body parts that require special equipment (eventually), there is also a sense of wonder at why girls generally don’t like to wrestle like they do and why they prefer Barbies to Batman. They giggle madly when we pass by the ladies undergarments in clothing stores and they struggle with the reason why they can’t be in the room when Mom says she’s getting dressed. Curiosity sometimes does get the better of them. A little while ago, Timmy (the engaged one) did walk in on me. Noticing my interesting underwear, he turned on his heel and ran to his brother yelling, “Gil, come see Mom’s funny t-shirt!”  

As the lone female in my little family, I realize that I am their ambassador to the female world, a commission that I hope I can represent well. When Simon was born, I was not disappointed at all with having three sons. I certainly had enough people reassuring me that I would be the princess of the family.  So far my boys have only made me feel like Xena the Warrior Princess as they beg me to make them cardboard swords while I threaten them with great doom if they go careening through my royal kitchen one more time.

There are certainly times when I struggle to explain the differences. As three sets of eyes watch me apply my makeup in the mirror and they question my motives, it’s hard to conceal my girlish vanity. It’s a lot easier when daddy’s around since all he has to say is “Because!” and they know that’s his final answer.

What I hope we convey to the boys in daily life is that boys and girls are not so different in how we should treat each other. Just because Mom is a better whiner, doesn’t mean Dad should let her get away with it. And just because Dad has better excuses, doesn’t mean he can’t wash the dishes. 

Until then, my oldest son has it all figured out. Just yesterday he told me, “Mom, girls can do anything that boys can do except one thing…wear swimming trunks!”

About a Million Years Ago

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Bill Watterson’s incorrigible Calvin

About a million years ago (okay, it was around twenty – yikes), I wrote a weekly column for our local newspaper. You know, back when people read the local newspaper.

It was a fun little column called Home Front and the essays centered on my life as a mom of three little boys who not only chose to stay at home with them full time but who also morphed into a homeschooler. Of three healthy (read: energetic) little boys that I birthed within four years. Oy.

They weren’t jump-off-the-roof-thinking-they-could-fly little boys. (Although one of them was a draw-on-the-side-of-the-minivan-with-a-rock boy.) But they were constantly hungry and curious and silly and infuriating and they gave me plenty of fodder for my column. Oh sure, I wrote about a few other things but really, it was mostly about them.

After about 5 years, I gave it up. And I sort of gave up writing. Well, public writing anyways.

As much as I wanted to be a writer, it just kept getting overshadowed by everything else: children, homeschooling, our business and, not the least reason, my lack of self-confidence. Instead I descended into my journals and only came up for air once in awhile to submit a re-worked piece somewhere or to write a play for the kids at my church to perform at Easter or Christmas.

Stephen Pressfield, Jeff Goins and countless others of my close, personal writing gurus would all tell me (via their various books on creativity and writing, whose advice I paid cash money for) that, published or not, I AM A WRITER. It’s not negotiable.

And somehow, it’s not. My brain thinks in Times New Roman and in blank pages being filled up. I get excited (no, not that kind of excited) fondling the keys on my laptop. I think about how I would write about some everyday scene I witness on the street and I see the people in my life as characters, not just…well, people. (Sorry, people.) I write all the time, but in an undisciplined, illegible handwriting, only-in-my-head kind of way.

In the last couple of years, the desire to write outside of my head again has been irrepressible. Sort of in an REO Speedwagon I Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore kind of way. (Or, for those of you who didn’t live the 80s, in a Justin Timberlake Can’t Stop the Feeling kind of way.)

One of the things I have to reckon with is that it’s okay to put it out there. I’m a 52-year-old woman who doesn’t have small children to hide behind anymore – they’re all very big and while I could actually hide behind them, they’ve all moved out. But I still have things to write about. Even if I never had kids, I would have things to write about.

I spent a couple of years a bit unmoored when the empty nest hit me. Lucky for us, my husband and I enjoyed the re-coupling phase when we became Rick & Bonnie again, not just Gil, Tim and Simon’s mom and dad. Because that happens for awhile, or for always, if you let it. But I also had to figure out who Just Bonnie was – aside from Rick and aside from the boys. And like an earwig of song you haven’t heard in forever that reverberates in your head ad nauseum (I’m talking to you Coward of the County), the thing that won’t let go is: I AM A WRITER.

Well, I argue with myself nonsensically, isn’t everybody? Noooooo…apparently not, says Jeff and Steven and others afflicted with this disease. Not everyone is born with this insane desire to spill the contents of their brain, their heart, their guts out for public consumption. Just like everyone is not a reader (gasp!) or a nature lover or a photographer or a lawyer or a plumber or a philatelist (whatever…look it up).

I am surprising myself with this little blog – this will be week 10 for me. I have not figured out everything yet, but I am seeing the beginning of a body of work again, like that pile of newspaper columns I saved from a million years ago.

It’s kind of my blog snowball. When one snowball gets too heavy, here’s hoping I’ll remember to just start another one. And then another one after that.

About Maturity: Be Boring

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From Austin Kleon’s brilliant book Steal Like an Artist

The great myth about prolific artists and entrepreneurs and people who, in general, just get a lot of sh*t done, is that they are more talented, have better connections or are just luckier than the rest of us. It’s the legend of the overnight success that has us green with envy and groaning that we couldn’t possibly ever get “there”, wherever “there” is.

Sure there are the crazy stories of someone who wrote one song about a pen, a pineapple and an apple and made a million dollars. (Disclaimer: this is all unsubstantiated hyperbole). You hear about these people because it’s so crazy and extreme. And that kind of stuff goes bonkers on Twitter, YouTube or Instagram.

The more likely story for someone who is trying to write a book, start a business or promote their fabulous line of cat backpacks looks like clocking a lotta hours on your passion project. And to the outside eye, it actually looks kinda boring.

“Be Boring” is one of the creativity secrets that Austin Kleon, “a writer who draws”, advocates in his book Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative. What Kleon is saying is not “sit on the couch and watch TV and never go anywhere or do anything.” Instead, he says that creativity requires a lot of energy so you need to set parameters on the rest of your life: keep your day job, stay out of debt, buy an calendar and use it, and make good marriages – both romantic and in business.

Austin Kleon is one of my favorite authors, but even more impressive to me is his practice of blogging every day. In my short experience as a twice-a-week blogger, this is just plain old impressive. I am finding it an uphill battle to be consistent, to find those pockets of time to write, to Keep Going – it even seems a little well, boring sometimes, compared to a night on the couch watching TV.

But that’s the lie. Don’t get me wrong – I like taking a break just as much as the next gal. The lie comes in when I tell myself, Oh, I can write or do the dishes or work out later. Instead, later finds me still on the couch and I’ve done nothing to move my life forward in a positive direction.

Growing up is a lot about being boring. Except boring might not look the same to everyone. It can look like sitting at my desk, going for a walk, or nurturing those habits that will shape my life like the tide slowly carves out a rock.

This advice from Kleon rings true to me. I know in my heart that the only way I will get those important big things done is by being consistent with those gentle boring everyday habits.

About Consistency: Everyday Action

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I have never had a truly chosen career. First and foremost, there was motherhood and then homeschooling all three of them. And then came a business partnership with my husband which was much like how we “planned” our children:  one day I woke up and found out I was “with business”. No one was more surprised than me how wonderful, endless, gratifying, stressful and fun either children or business could be.

We have been lucky/blessed/rewarded: the kids come back to visit and not just for the free food and beer. And business has grown on me and it actually pays me, so there’s that.

But writing, willing my butt into the chair every day, this comes at me comically, it is so ridiculously hard, with no promise ever of reward. Every day, I ask myself to what end am I doing this? I scan lists of Pulitzer Prize winners and New York Times Best Sellers and I think I must be crazy. I have only really written for myself, and there was that $10 per column run I had with the local paper fifteen years ago, the weekly discipline of which sent me over the edge, or at least running back to the safe parameters of balancing Quicken, baking muffins and breaking up fights among my ruffians.

Those things were immediate and right before me. I knew what to do. In fact, it was downright easy in how I knew how to do them. But writing? Half the time I don’t know where I’m going with something or what I’m writing it for. Much of writing is just practice, practice, practice: following that prompt, free-writing, morning pages, stream-of-consciousness – all things to prime the pump. Like a panhandler who sifts the sand for days, weeks, years, I write to find the nugget of gold. Sometimes you are sitting on a gold mine, but more often it’s the return every day to comb through the muck to find that one small nugget. It’s consistency that will unveil both the nugget and the vein.

The stuff I crank out every day is crap. Pretty much. Anne Lamott has coined an apt phrase for this: the “shitty first draft”. The point being that you have to write something and then, from something you can write something better. But something better will not come from nothing. Writing is part discipline, part endless slogging through the muck and part divination as you peer into the sludge you’ve contrived of your own accord and glimpse that something that has potential. And that has to be what gets me back to the chair the next day.