It’s been a week since I purposed (albeit publicly) to write every day.  So far I have joined forces with two writer friends for accountability and encouragement, written several blogs for In With Skin as well as article drafts for our May/June “beach ready” issue, transcribed my own personal blog posts and a few short story vignettes.  Writing has not been the problem.  The part I’ve been struggling with has been putting pen to paper (or more accurately, fingers to keyboard) to begin working on the story in my mind and in my heart that has been nagging at me for more years than I can remember.  The questions doing laps in my brain have revolved from Where do I even begin? to should I start with back story or dive right into the action or core of my piece?  Better yet, should I allow the reader to get into my character’s heads or leave a little mystery by playing hard to get? (not something I’m good at doing in real life, let alone in fiction).

Organization, the write descriptors, grammar, sentence structure—all of those details can and will be tweaked more than once during the process, of that I have no doubt.  So before allowing myself an out by becoming too fixated on the logistics, I finally just had to accept that starting was key…to simply transfer my thoughts onto the screen in front of me (or my ever-present notebook if laptop is not handy).

This brings me to a Facebook chat I engaged in last week with a good friend of mine.  He mentioned there was a typo in a recent blog.  After my initial thrill that someone actually read my blog, my anal retentive self immediately begged to know where the offensive error could be found.  A couple of minutes (although it felt much longer) went by as I waited for his response.  He mentioned I spelled the word write when I spoke about figuring out the write way to…  I assured him it was intentional and goes along with the name of my blog, Always the Write Time…because “I’m a writer,” I said.  And then in a moment of something I can only describe as clarity, “Wow, I think that’s the first time I ever called myself a writer.  And meant it.”  Baby steps.  Now I just have to keep writing, knowing everything else will eventually work itself out. ~ cs