A line from 'The Response'

"'Air On the G String' is a famous piece of music by Johann Sebastian Bach and not what happens when a woman eats too many beans and then wears a skimpy bikini. "  — the pianist André De La Lemieux in my novel 'The Response'

Writer's block?

I do not believe in writer's block, and neither should you. If staring at a blank page keeps you from writing, just fill it with words. That's what I do. I just start writing. The key is not to expect anything meaningful from the get go.  As I once pointed out, the muses do not talk you INTO writing, they talk to you WHILE you write. In my experience, even when I start out completely uninspired, it does not take long before a thought comes to me, a precious new insight perhaps or a gem of a metaphor, which I had no idea would rise from my unconscious mind. I may delete everything I wrote up to that point, but it was still the simple process of writing it that brought me there.

So when I find myself not writing, I don't blame it on writer's block. I blame it on a lack of discipline. Every time I sit down to write, the above happens to me, but the problem is that I cannot always bring myself to sit down.

Maybe I should do my writing while standing. ;-)

Maybe it's experience...

Quite often these days I write words I enjoy reading the next day. It used to be that I cringed every single time I looked at something I wrote the day before. Somehow I've learned now to look at my writing with tomorrow's eyes. I still have to tweak a few sentences here and there, of course, but the re-writes are nowhere near as drastic as they used to be in the past. It's a real time-saver, to say the least. ;-)

One of many epigraphs that head the chapters of my novel:

"Know your strength, but focus on your purpose. Take it from a seasoned builder like me that one must not watch the hand that swings the hammer but the one that holds the nail." — Tobiel the carpenter, friend of Tehtena

A line from "The Response"

People tell me that my wife looked beautiful. This would actually make me feel good if they didn't sound so utterly surprised when they said it.

A line from the novel

"Be consistent in all you do, my son, for the beggar who forgets to limp on his way out will end up empty-handed when he comes hobbling back for more." — Tobiel, the carpenter,  in one of his frequent impersonations of King Solomon

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It's always the little things that touch me. My soul lives on bite-size blessings.