Saturday, May 10, 2008

Keeping On

It came to me this morning that writing a blog is quite a bit like publishing. Words go out into the world without me, and I cannot tell if anyone reads them or not. I'd love comments, reassurance that someone out there in cyberland reads what I post, but there is no guarantee and it's not reasonable to expect one. So, I'll keep writing and sending work out, because that's my part of the scene. Lao Tzu says, "Do your work; then step aside." That advice carried me through many tense days in my former work place, and now I have to apply it to the writing life.

Yesterday I had a momentary pause when I opened my documents folder, clicked on Fiction, then on Short Stories, and could not find the story I started this week. Oh, no, some gremlin got into my computer and ate my story! And I had not made a hard copy. Well, two lessons there--print out the work so I have a back up, and title the file correctly. The computer grabbed what looked to it like the file name, my name at the top of the first page. Mystery solved. And I did make progress with the piece, so much so that I dreamed/thought about the story all night. That's a good sign, meaning that I do have something real going on in this piece. I'm not going to talk about the details here, because it's never good to saw off the limb you're sitting on. Better to put that energy into the composition. KD