I was going to call this one ‘Write with your pants off’ but I realized there is already a book with a similar title, a shortcut to the meat of which is provided here.
My own approach to the blog was different from the outline in that I am not actually wearing pants, and it led me to a sense of newfound understanding about the idea of vulnerability. Writing is about being vulnerable. It is a duality of a sort because you are actually hiding behind the words and having them speak your truth, but in that truth you are extremely visible and vulnerable. I believe the best writers embrace that vulnerability–especially in terms of what their characters experience and how those individuals are reflective of them as people and their own experiences. Write what you know. I should then be writing about loss and love and being seen as less than by those closest to me. In fact, my upcoming novella is all of those things. I hope to write it in full over the next two months–as a bridge into the larger two projects I am excited and terrified about.
Pants off means looking at yourself for real. I, again for example, am suffering from a debilitating pinched nerve, which has expanded into a cluster of nerves that impact me in various debilitating ways and arouse a question of my own mortality…. You don’t know how much I’d prefer to say impending mortality, whatever that means… Pants off means I am looking at the coming shift in life where my kids are all gone and I am left to live and love with the Lady Talis. This is wonderful and terrifying as well, because we have longed for the moment, but to see it so close is to see it being real and to not truly know if we have everything in place to seize that moment.
Gosh. A lot happened once I started looking inward. Maybe I ought to do it more often.