I’ve lost count how many times I’ve started this 12 week program, only to stop around week 4 or 5 (I made it to week 8 at one point. It’s not like it’s a crazy boot camp or anything like that. Rather, it’s that even though I wanted my creativity to flourish and take over, to make life fun and interesting and maybe open some new doors for me… I let myself slide.

I’m surprised I started this program again, considering I all but forgot about my promise to myself to re-start it this week. I can’t even find the book right now; it’s probably in one of those boxes I was going to clean out last weekend and never got around to. But on my coffee table was the “morning pages journal” I got by accident from Barnes and Noble a few months ago. I was supposed to get a different book in the mail, and I just left this one on the coffee table while I tried to find the old receipt.

Clearly, it didn’t bug me to have this book around. Not sure why, since usually I’d use pocket folders and notebook paper to store it all in (or binders, in previous years). I love school supply shopping–I can get SO much paper for these things.

What hit me was the need for a major reminder, though. This morning pages journal is definitely big enough and thick enough that I’d have a hard time forgetting it at home when I should be out and about. But I wouldn’t want to keep on buying them if I didn’t have to (which I don’t).

It was a wake-up call, telling me to wake up and get crackin’ on my goal to be a writer, and to come up with fun story ideas or research ideas, anything possible.

It was admittedly a great way to waste a little time while I’m STILL waiting to go down to my tutorial class offsite. It’s such a long drive and I’m sitting in Starbucks with a cup of coffee, gray as hell outside, a little chilly, and wet, wet, wet everywhere, trying not to fall asleep before I can get back in the car and head the rest of the way. I’m about to head out to the one aspect of my job I like the least, and maybe that’s why I’m tired and more sullen than usual. I can only hope the week goes smoothly, because I won’t have as much access to the punching bags as I’ll need to keep sane as it is.

I’ve failed miserably in doing a good job with my health the past month (I can already see the disappointment on my super-sweet doctor’s face when I see her next week). I keep forgetting to take my iron for the anemia and haven’t paid attention to what I’ve been eating. I let my need to reorganize my kitchen distract me from actually cooking in it.

The good thing is I finally got it mostly reorganized (better shelving units in my pantry will make it so much easier to see what all I have, which is already helping me plan meals). I just need to cook for myself again.

I guess you could say, “get creative” with food and cooking again. Yeah.

Other than health, which should be my priority (even though it clearly hasn’t been), my biggest concerns are with my creativity, very rusty from a lack of use on the writing front. I shudder to think of all the half-finished ideas and stories I’ve given up on because of rejections and constant revisions. I know all the well-meaning advice out there about just doing it, improving it, moving along and pretty soon–poof! You’re published and doing well, able to get the confidence you need to write well and have good enough income that you don’t have to worry so much about absolutely having to be at a job you have to tolerate more than you think would be possible.

That’s ultimately what I’ve always wanted, in between everything else: to be a writer. A good researcher, and a good writer of books and stories–that’s what I’ve wanted most of my life.

It’s just hard to let myself get thinking about that. I think a lot of my family thought something like that was a waste of time (dad certainly did). it was all about “be practical.” well, trying for mediocrity and practical is killing me a little more every day. I can’t keep going for that. Even if other people see writing and what I want to do as just some very lengthy hobby, I can’t care about that.

I have to try, and keep trying until I can do it. It’s too hard to just sit back, knowing I have a file cabinet full of ideas that might just need a few tweaks, if only I’d go in there and browse around in my old ideas files. Some were never going to work, or are too similar to other works that have come out the past few years (by accident, but close enough I wouldn’t want the comparison).

Like my ideas, the sun is trying to come out and make it all worthwhile today. I have a lot of catching up to do in music and even more in writing, so while the weather is blah as hell, I think I can do some mental unpacking as I clean, and keep these pages handy to write in first thing in the day. I started WAY late today, but as the book says, “better late than never.”

I just worry about “late” becoming “never” out of sheer laziness or tiredness from stress and anemia. Some days it’s hard to tell what’s what.

But thanks to what I wrote this morning, I’ve got something that can percolate and maybe prompt me to look up some old ideas for tomorrow. That would be sweet.

Until then, gotta go to work in a few, and I can’t stop yawning. And now I’ll end up with sugar to prevent a total crash.