a twice-told tale

It always seems to end like this; a time full of solitude ending with a drive to Atlanta, resulting in a Sunday-morning urge to write before the wakening of the house disturbs the morning quiet. Not a bad thing, really, for someone who has been suffering from something that, from the correct angle, holds a distinct resemblance of writer’s block.

Not ‘block,’ per se. The words are there, but they’ve lacked importance. The need for an audience has been absent, almost welcomingly so, and as a result I’ve gone on living my quiet life without sharing my words with anyone else.—and yet—I woke up this morning to the sound of the rooster fine-tuning his arias, and the goats’ chorus of complaints because they hadn’t been fed yet, and I get the feeling that maybe there are more words left to say on a site like this.

The challenge is not to just write, not to mindlessly stamp out links to the verbal effort of others, but to write interestingly, perhaps compellingly, and to avoid multiple tellings of the same story. Writing thoughtfully and carefully about one’s life has limits; it’s difficult not to exhaust your favorite stories, remembrances, beliefs, and dreams.

Eventually you must do one of two things: turn your viewpoint ouside, or become the dreadful aunt at family gatherings who repeats the same stories time and again, never realizing that the audience always remembers a twice-told tale.

My problem is focusing outward. I’ve had many things to say that deserve a better telling than what I’ve been able to manage, and thus I’ve stayed—silent, it would seem—unless you saw the unfinished pile of words lying, festering, on my desktop.

Those who have seen me recently know my current project is a set of blue braids for dragon*con. The massive pile of blue braids, streaked with purple and occasionally green, stacked in the living room are testament to my being nearly half-finished with this project. I am taking photos of the project as I go, with plans to create quite an amusing writeup of the Immense Braiding Project™ upon completion.

For now, I wouldn’t take this entry as an official return to writing as much as an admission to my current [public] lack of it. I’ll be braiding and just generally carrying on, and when they’re ready, the words will come.

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