#amwriting

Let me state, for the record, that writing is great. I mean it. It’s a wonderful activity, an unparalleled job.

It pays shit.

It’s wall to wall rejection.

It’s unending work.

It’s draining.

It can be drudgery.

It can be thankless.

It can feel like having your chest exposed to swarming hornets.

And I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

What writing has that makes it all worth while, is creation, expression, art. It is the feeling of elation when you channels the muse to the page. It is feeling of having written a phrase, a sentence, a scene that speaks truth. Witty, and wise. Fumbling and fearful.

Feeling the pulse, writing, having written.

They are great things.

Now. Back to work!

LUW Spring Conference 2019 coming up

Let us consider the writer, an artist, a lone voice in the creative wilderness, dreaming and plotting, creating and expressing. Now imagine a collection of these, a room of creators, each driven to make and imagine, witness and weave. If energy and love were light, we'd be blinded to see it.

We writers are driven by unseen forces, muses, geniuses, the subconscious, working at first alone, listening to the aether for inspiration, testing the limits of our own skill to bridge the quiet moments when the angel is silent. Then perhaps to open our book and our heart to others.

Alone we make, but then, like a great migration, we collect together in miraculous conclaves. It is a wonder. We congregate to congratulate. We share. We understand each others perils, if not our genres. We sympathize with the journey, if not the outcomes. And we share our knowledge and talents to strengthen the community as whole.

It is the best in us.

This is the purpose of our conferences, to reach our dreams by helping others reach theirs. To go forward by helping others come along. 

Case in brilliant point: The League of Utah Writers Spring Conference which is happening this April. Here we summon our own and a few friends to present insights to us all. Small or big— a comma, or a magic system, dialog, setting, plot, all is discussed and examined to improve our craft. For those seeking, there is hard learned advice about marketing tips, netting agents, cornering publishers, blogs and book signings. At every level, with every facet there is something to learn, and something to share.

Spring Conference is a gem of an event. It’s priced to allow everyone to come. It encourages us all to be a part of the process. It is a chance to build up our skills, knowledge and resume. It’s a chance to be with each other, each of us artist and writer defying the blank page, turning expectations into realities, bucking the odds, enjoying the ride. Dreaming the dream and making it real in letters.

Living in Letters.,

Make sure you have April 27th blocked off on your calendar for a casual, exciting, and rejuvenating event. Sign up is now at the League of Utah Writers website.

www.leagueofutahwriters.com

See you at Spring Conference 2019.

Sick

I’ve been visited by a true ruler of the planet. I’m not sure which variety, pedigree, house or cadre, but one of vessels of life itself has made residence in my sinuses and is ruling my body in aches and sneezes, oozes and limits. It is, however, a generous ruler, and gives freely its largess of copious snot.

Fortunately, I am a-self-employed writer, creating masterpieces out of trauma, big and little. Here’s one now. When I finally get the energy to write again, I’ll have a renewed understanding of sickness, infection and misery that I might have forgotten from the last hundred times I was here. Am I fortunate or what?

My doctor swears I’m not contagious, at least I think that’s what he said. It was hard to understand him through the blue biohazard suit.

I suffer, and like all great writers, and men in general I hear, I shall not bear my misery alone. I will tell the world! I will move them to sympathize, to feel the pressure and my dry nasal passages, the dizziness and dehydration. It burns, it smears the world. Pressures the senses, makes things oblong, stretched, and gooey. Here is proof that reality is only what we perceive, and is how we perceive it. The world is thick semi-clear yellowish resistance. This is true. This is here. The air is thick, pushes back against the slightest disturbance, a hand reaching for a tissue, a head raising to see the cat. The pillow is harder, the Kleenex turned to sand paper, the water to paste, the caffeine to nectar. Time is not frozen, but freezing. Glacial and quiet. Long moments of nothing, staring, empty, waiting, and sudden returns to now, which is later but still the same. Pills alarm, reminders to eat, stand, email, think.

It is a gift. That which does not kill me makes me stronger. I count my blessings that this bug is not anti-biotic resistance and that I have the time and means to mend and notice it. I bow down to the rulers of life, the teachers of death, the lenses of reality.

I got a bug.

Snowed In

I can’t remember the last time Salt Lake City shut down due a snowstorm. I remember some pretty hellish depths growing up. Remember driving to college dictating my will over a phone up on Wasatch, but today, the whole valley shut down. For a foot of snow.

I’m embarrassed. Come on, Utah. This is, well Utah. We have skiers on our license plates. Snow shouldn’t be a stranger.

But it’s wrecking havoc.

The first major storm of the season is always the worse because people forget how to drive in snow. Driving in snow is about stopping in snow. Sure you’ve got four wheel drive and can zip through a foot of snow like it’s fog, but I don’t care how big your Hummer is, you can’t stop any faster than anyone else and all that speed means that the freeway gets closed for a half a day. Congratulations.

I suppose there are snow plows out there pushing snow banks into recently cleared driveways, but they aren’t here yet. Are there as many as there used to be? I feel old remembering my childhood when a storm would hit and the roads would be cleared in an hour. What happened? Layoffs? Tax cuts? Run out of salt? Something’s different, I tell you.

Drivers are stupid and over-confident. Check.

Snow hasn’t really stopped. Check

But this is Utah. A mountain state. Home of the Winter Olympics.

I should be able to go get a burrito!