NaBlPoMo and away we go

Well here we are, November, time of Thanksgiving and good intentioned blog posting for NaBloPoMo aka National Blog Posting Month. I want prizes!

The tickler for today is "What is your favorite part about writing?"

I have not written fiction in a very long time, probably about 3 years. I write a lot of non fiction in the form of acedemic papers. I miss writing fiction. One of the things I am looking forward to if I ever finish school is writing for pleasure. My favorite part of writing for pleasure is creating characters. I enjoy inventing interesting people and breathing life into them. I also enjoy finding the perfect word, the word that conveys exactly what I want to say no more, no less.

I often have a hard time paring down my writing. I read an excellent book on concise writing called "Writing Down the Bones" By Natalie Goldberg and it has helped me make my writing more spare. My natural resting place, however, is verbose. I like the idea of making my writing be the minimum most clean it can be, practice however, eh.

I like writing metered poetry, I like the constraint and the creativity it encourages.

I will leave you with one of my favorite poems of all time, not mine but Pablo Neruda's

I love it not just for the beauty of the words but also the perfect way it speaks to a love I have experienced, simply elegently perfectly described:

Sonnet 17

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,

or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.

I love you as certain dark things are to be
loved,in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms

but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;

thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,

risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.

I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;

so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,

so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,

so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

The above is a salt rose

Oh the pressure to produce meaningful content, oh the guilt for not writing, to hell with it I say!!! I am not going to blog every day darn it, I am going to try to do it pretty often in honor of NABLOPOMO but I am not going to stress over it. Take that NABLOPOMO.

The problem with a blog is that it is so public, do I want my students reading this, do I want my friends and relatives reading this? This public nature tends to rob me of content or make me feel self conscious. My introvert nature rears its lovely back and says, hmmm perhaps not.

I always think of things to blog about when I am away from my computer and pen and paper, I say it out loud hoping to remember "I should write a blog about that" but what usually happens when I sit down to write is that I remember saying the words and the exact quality of the light glinting off my friend's glasses that I said the comment to or who originated the conversation that led the the exclamation but what I want to write about. . . gone.

I like to think of those topics as being on the back burner of my mind, gathering momentum and content while my more conscious self worries about things like working on my paper on medications that will kill you if the disease doesn't get you first, or on pharmacological applications of bacteria cytotoxins or some such catchy stuff.

I write a lot, every day. When it comes to writing for pleasure, which my intent is that my blog will be pleasure writing, I find my dance card filled with the more practical, medical writing that is my education and profession. I am quite often tempted to write about my pursuits in health care but it is so specialized and to the non-medical person boring or incomprehensible that I make the choice not to talk about it here. The other thing that is my somewhat obsession is teaching. I think probably 6/10 blog posts are about teaching and how much I love it so I should probably cut y'all a break and not talk about that.

I enjoy academic writing, don't get me wrong but because I produce so much work that I MUST do the delightful flower in the field of writing that is fiction, or essay just really gets mowed under. I hope it is there waiting for me when I finish school, I hope I have not killed it dead with the stodgy stylings of academia (although I must confess I tend to push the envelope of academic style when it is wedded to my personal writing style). I have not written a short story since I started back to college and as for an essay they have pretty much all been either related to teaching, health care, teaching health care, politics or gender theory.

Here are the thoughts of the day that I had my students do a timed writing on. . .

1. 90% of life is attitude, no matter how much or how little one has to start with, one's attitude toward the world will shape how one ends up.

2. Better to do something imperfectly than nothing perfectly

Ta for now dolls, I have another post brewing and I need to stir the pot

PS I have included the above painting of "St George and the Dragon" by Paolo Ucello 1456 because I love it.

PPS When I was a little girl it made me sad because I thought St George was killing the woman's pet dragon.