Letter to a New Journaler

Dear Friend,

I am so happy to hear that you would like to start journaling!

Journaling is one of the best things you can do for yourself. Journaling allows you to clear your head and fill it up at the same time! When you write, you can figure things out. You explore and discover; you vent and get blessed; you think and create and most of all, you come to terms with yourself.

Your journal is your friend; I’m sure you’ve heard that before and it may seem like a strange concept at first. I remember when I was a little girl and my grandmother gave me a diary. She told me it would be my friend and that I should write as if I’m talking with my friends. This didn’t work for me. I was too self conscious. I thought I had to begin each entry with the words, “Dear Diary…” and then I felt silly writing letters to an inanimate object. Then I worried about how stupid I would sound if anyone ever got a hold of it and read it. As I got older, however, I began to understand…

Your journal is an extension of your very being. Through writing, you merely have another avenue for expression. That’s it, and in so doing, you find freedom from the judgments you may have about writing. You will learn to let go of the idea that what you write has to be creative or inspirational or even meaningful, and when you do, you will be hooked on journaling for the rest of your life!

For me, it works like this: my journal is a record of at least some of what my brain encounters on any given day. It is my lists, my planning, things I need to remember, my drafts of ideas and projects; my journal is full of random thoughts and lots of nonsense. Some days I fill the pages with things I shouldn’t say out loud, both bad and good; other days I write pages of self loathing. On happy days I may brag. Once in awhile I write something that is really good and then I may or may not ever return to it.

My suggestion to you as you begin to journal is to do it with total liberty in your heart and soul. Write whatever you think or feel and do it on paper that you are comfortable messing up. Don’t buy some beautiful and expensive journal because then you won’t want to put anything “bad” on those pages. A journal is not intended to be any sort of completed project for display; rather it is the messy, incomplete, in-process thoughts that govern our days. Feel free to scratch out and scribble, that’s what our minds do all the time!

One question I want you to ask yourself is why you want to journal. You don’t need a deep or even a clear answer to this – just think about what you want to get out of it before you start. Many books about journaling are geared to some specific aspect of journaling. These may include topics such as journaling for self discovery; self recovery; spiritual enlightenment; spiritual growth; spiritual quest; inspiration; therapy; creative expression; physical healing; mental sanity; social development, and the list goes on and on. Journaling is an excellent tool to help us face and deal with the many things life throws at us. I want you to think about what your purpose is because you can find prompts and guides to lead you and help keep you on track and committed to the act of writing depending on what your purpose may be, even if that purpose is “just because…!”

There are tons of books available about journaling and certainly they will help guide and inspire you. Just be careful not to spend all your time reading about writing; WRITE!

Before you buy or borrow any books about journaling, get yourself a cheap spiral notebook from the store and a pen that feels good in your hands (I like mechanical pencils and the BIC medium point) and start writing!

Great authors of books about journaling:

• Anne Lamotte
• Natalie Goldberg
• Judy Reeves
• Sheila Bender
• Julia Cameron
• Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
• Elizabeth Andrew
• Henriette Ann Klauser

These are just a few great places to start!

Enjoy!! And when you get a chance, I hope you’ll let me know how it’s going!

Meeting with Sisters In Crime

Last Saturday I gave a presentation to the Indiana chapter of Sisters in Crime. I talked about what I do: write articles for online clients. My aim was to show them how much content there is online, thus demonstrate the infinite number of possibilities to be paid for writing. The second part of my agenda was to show them how although writing articles may seem irrelevant to their passion, writing crime and mystery stories, these are many intangible rewards that all lead to improved research and writing skills and increased creative and critical thinking skills. Their reception and responses told me that what I offered them was both interesting and meaningful.

To my delightful surprise, however, the experience was more interesting and meaningful to me than I could have ever imagined!

I have mentioned here before how writing is such an isolated and lonely experience. Well, being around so many professionally accomplished writers was just the surge of colleague interaction I have been needing. I sat in on their business meeting before giving my talk and was excited by the energy in the room! Collaboration, efficiency, friendly candor, the exchange of information and the sharing of resources all inspired me with hope and renewed enthusiasm for my own work and unreached dreams.

They had a lot to cover in that business meeting because next month, they will host a launch party for their new anthology: Mayhem at the Brickyard, coming out to coincide with the Indianapolis 500. Because it is an Indianapolis-based group, they’ve written mysteries that center on the racing theme. This is their second anthology. The first, released one year ago, is titled Racing Can Be Murder. Both books can be purchased online at Amazon and ordered through Barnes and Noble and Borders book stores. Both books are published by Blue River Press and distributed by Cardinal Publishers Group.

As some of us shared lunch together after my presentation, I learned more about their group and in particular, about those who sat around the big round table. A microbiologist, a lawyer, a teacher in the state prison, a forensic artist, a psychologist, a retired physicist /publisher, and a psychic all talked about recent projects, each interjecting pieces of their own areas of expertise as “what if” prompts to fuel the conversation. It was a feast for the imagination!

And I came away more resolved than ever to pursue the company of fascinating people.

My conclusion is this: every day week the extraordinary in all that you encounter because it is there!

Links

Sisters in Crime Inc.

Sisters in Crime - Indiana Chapter

New Writing Venue

Our writing group now has a new meeting venue. We met for the first time last night at Art and Soul, Muncie’s newest art gallery. Surrounded by the beauty, energy, and even haunting power of the paintings on display, we were in an environment rich with creative spirit and profound inspiration.

We were compelled to write about the artwork around us. In the process of writing, each of us experienced that mysterious, magical, and majestic thing that happens when hands and paper and pens are propelled by a force beyond our own selves and produces surprises that no one could have predicted.

The hairs on my arms stand up when I tell you that all muses were present!

I was exhausted by the time I got home. Mentally I was spent from a day of hard work, and physically I ached from too much sitting all day. But my spirit was dancing like the whole chorus line in an exuberant finale as creativity bubbled to the surface of my consciousness. Ideas were coming out of the tightly twisted mass of my brain and they were good – all of them! The muses wouldn’t let me sleep – I was high and in love.

Oh, to be submerged in the warm, gooey, organic ecstasy of human creativity and divine inspiration is what this life is all about! I am so fortunate to be right here, right now, and to share this time and space with these people!

It is well; it is well with my soul!

Art and Soul

Note: Photo provided by "Downtown Muncie"

punctuation matters

I was driving down the road yesterday when I passed a church and noticed the sign outside:

spring gods greeting cards.

Cool! I thought to myself. I wonder if the cards are hand-made? I started to visualize beautiful artsy greeting cards, each a one-of-a-kind treasure. Hand-made paper perhaps? Dried and pressed flowers? Colored pencil drawings… maybe swatches of cotton fabric glued to the front…

Then I started wondering about the spring gods. Who are they anyway? Venus the sun god? Maybe there is a god of sweet aromas or a god of colors. These spring gods pricked my curiosity as I have never heard of spring gods before. (And believe me, I’ve heard of most of the gods around here.) I picked up speed as my enthusiasm grew – I’ve got to see those spring gods greeting cards!

I was several miles down the road before reality hit me. I could see my teenagers roll their eyes and hear their exclamation “DUH!” that tells me they can’t believe how naïve I can be. Wait a minute, I said to myself… that was a conservative Christian church back there, they would never use new-age verbiage referring to “gods”. No! they meant the ONE and ONLY, all Omnipotent, GOD Almighty!

OK. So I had to rethink it and interpret that sign for its intended message. They meant GOD: their God.

So the subject must be SPRING. Yes, and because spring is full of a multitude of blessings, the word “cards” was plural. I’m getting it!

The sign meant that Spring is God’s way of sending us all kinds of really cool greeting cards! Yes!

I’m not always so literal, but that one took considerable time and mental energy on my part to get the message. If only they had used punctuation.

A couple of capitol letters

A colon

An apostrophe

An exclamation mark

Spring: God’s greeting cards!