Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘Writers Resources’

Apr 18

Time

Punjabi

Punjabi (Photo credit: John C Abell)

I have been meaning to write. I mean it. I really did.  If only somehow, I could have transcribed the words from my brain to the blog, life would be easy. No wait, on second thought.  That’s probably not a good idea.  I am coming to the end of a workday, and somehow it seemed fitting to close out the business hours with something on my personal to do list.  Something that I can say I am truly passionate about.  Before you say self-pity, I meant the new convictions in my life.

I recently turned 40, and let’s just say it hasn’t been easy to NOT feel sorry for myself.  I want to read more, work out more, write more, travel more, do all the things I have been promising myself now since I was 18.  Then it hits me. Why not start now?  What is really stopping me?  So here I go again (Sorry family and loved ones).  Writing, that is.  But there will be a change.  That much I promise you.  I am going back to my roots (no I am not going to write in Punjabi).  I will become a columnist. What will I write about, you ask? (at least,  I hope your asking)  The life around me, my new passions, things that piss me off.  Perhaps it will be much ado about nothing, but I will be writing, moving the fingers across the keyboard, keeping the writer in me on life support, because I know HE is dying.

So here goes to the new me.  Wish me luck!

Related articles

Jul 25

Happiness and Thank You: A Blog Post

Lorsque paraît la beauté..

Image by ImAges ImprObables via Flickr

It’s easy to write when your sad, angry and full of hope, but harder for me to write when I am happy.  My high school teacher Marie Tollstrup used to say that if you look at most poetry and literature, it has traces of negative emotion with a happy ending merely to showcase the writer’s whimsy, yet today I feel obligated to note the love surrounding her and I, amongst our dear friends, family from abroad and in general.  Each day in the past week has been full of positive emotion, brimming with future possibility, and the reality that our time has finally come. This December will make it 5 years when I fell in love so deeply and truly with someone who I had known all my life that it still feels unreal that I am with someone so beautiful inside and out.  But I digress.  These past few days have made me realize how truly blessed and lucky I am to have the people I do in my life.  Looking at my past posts, I have spent an inordinate amount of time whining about the ones that truly do not matter, ignoring the ones that come around me at a drop of a hat, and I cannot help be thankful for being just good enough to have them in my life.  I do not know what I did to deserve them but dammit, I am going to make damn sure I keep them!

 

Thank you, thank you, and thank you.  I wish I was more eloquent but I cannot stop smiling, while soaking in these beautiful days and events with amazing friends and family.  THANK YOU!

Related articles

Jul 4

Energy: A Blog Post

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

I remember writing few months back where all my energy, ideas and focus melded into one need to get the story done.  I was smiling and truly enjoying the process, just living the dream of being a writer, knowing that what was being laid down was pretty good and I could do this.  I want that moment back, those blissful hours when it seemed becoming a writer full time was not a fantasy, that I was good enough dammit!  Yet lately, I seem to have found people who either don’t think much of my writing or dismiss it.  Worse, still I have others who manage to always feel bad about blogging or posting on Facebook even when I am supremely careful of not blogging names and keeping my status updates to a minimum.  I feel stifled and trapped into being a certain type of personality on social media as if I have to apologize for being open about my thoughts and feelings.  Sure, I have said too much sometimes and called out others when it was not my business to, and to that I can only apologize and call it a learning process, yet I feel trapped with the label of someone who talks too much.  It’s soul and creativity killing to know that my words are scrutinized to be either dismissed or confirm my status as a big mouth.

I want my words to have the energy they did when I wrote freely and got them out of being in my body, bottled up for so long.  That’s where I want to get to.  Let’s hope that the ones who are judging me know that they are killing me softly.

Related articles

Jun 18

Facing and Fearing: A Blog Post

Lost: Missing Pieces

Image via Wikipedia

1) The cost of inaction is not much truth be told if I accept my life as it is.  I have amazing friends, family, wife and work yet what is missing is my creative soul.  I feel I traded that in somewhere in my first marriage and it has taken me decades to realize how much I miss it.  As materially wealthy as I am, my soul is poor and starved for action and the more I have done this writing exercise, the more I see how it is to get out of inaction.

I have so much more to gain by trying that the only failure that will string is the lost chances to write.  I see myself writing regularly and lately my visions for work and love have gotten clearer as if I was in a fog and until writing cleared away the cobwebs, I was merely content.  Now I am full of energy, working out, writing, loving, planning things, it’s as if I am running out of time, and I want to get it all done and now.

Related articles

May 30

5 Comments

My Writing Sucks: A Blog Post

Janss Steps, Royce Hall in background, UCLA

Image via Wikipedia

For the first time since I started on my UCLA extension classes, I am wondering what made me think I could actually write.  This is the first time also I took only one class, and yet it feels as if my entire certificate for creative non fiction depends on it.  The class is for personal essays, how to write one and get published.  We have only written 5 essays but it feels as if I have written 50.  The worse part: my writing absolutely, without any doubt in my mind, sucks.  I mean it’s awful.  Instead of showing, I am telling. Instead of describing people, I am using stock characters.  And grammar? Forget about it, it looks like I stopped around 8th grade.

At first, it was easy to blame the class (teacher sucks, essays too general, no lectures, etc) and then I realized that the issue really was me.  My first topic was about my grandfather, the second about my mom and sisters opening up Ziba, the third about my difficult writing, and the fourth and fifth about cancer.  Each topic emotionally loaded for me, but more importantly not really dealt with at the time so as I began writing, I lose myself into that time period so the writing resembles that of a child.

Writing about Ziba and my dad;s drinking is just plain hard mainly because I have such mixed emotions about it.  When Ziba started, I was at UCLA and then Law school and I was 13 when my dad drank and it has had a powerful effect on me.  The main reason its hard because Ziba is in my lifeblood and I love my dad so much now, more so because he is one of the few people I know in my life who did a 180 turn in life to save his family.  I have so much respect, pride and love for him that it’s hard to look at a time when I felt nothing for him.  As for Ziba, it;s just hard to write about it because I have the guilt that I could have done so much more and that perhaps I didn’t have much to do with it for it to be successful.  In a way, maybe I am riding it coattails, but then I see my family and they just don’t see it like that and won’t let me either.

Finally, my love and cancer. This part’s the hardest just because it was so recent but more importantly it involved someone I love so completely that it’s hard to imagine being without her.  So here I am, in a personal essay class where all the essays are so personal that they don’t mean much to others because I havent dealt with my own issues, and thus the writings are full of meandering thoughts and emotions that frankly aren’t very fun to read if I was totally honest with myself.  Let’s hope I figure it out soon before I truly feel like a failure.  I am open to suggestions :)

Related articles

Jan 21

3 Comments

Birthday Resolution

Cover of "Enter the Dragon"

Cover of Enter the Dragon

I am struggling with who I am, who I want to be and I am nearly 40. That’s the latest mantra in my mind.  My desire to be a writer, to be a lawyer, to be truly great at something is getting lost somewhere in the shuffle because I refuse to do the day-to-day.  I rather indulge in fantasies like winning a Trillion dollars (who does that?)  than sitting my butt down and creating something new.  It’s easier to dream and imagine but so much more difficult to create (except for tension).

by Jemal Yarbrough

 

So I approach being 39 with some dread because I have to answer to myself.  I happen to find a list of things I wanted to accomplish by the time I was 40 and was disappointed to see that I had managed only 5 out of 50, but then it hit me that the others did not matter to me as much.  I need new goals, new things to achieve.  Actually, that is a lie, I only have one goal now: to be a published writer.  Too often, I have made excuses, too often have I blamed others, too often I sit at this desk and write about wanting to write but then write nothing of value.  Too often, and so instead of a new years resolution, I made a birthday one: WRITE.

No matter what.  Write.  Write lists, write journal, write morning pages, write something, anything.  Just keep that pen moving (well in my case fingers over the keyboard). I can’t help feeling like Bruce Lee in Enter The Dragon during the mirror sequence.  I am surrounded by versions of myself but each of me partially hidden by my image while I look for the elusive antagonist (in this case, The Writer).  And with a loud Kiyaaahh, I shall break those mirrors, break what’s holding me back, break into a new kind of Bruce Lee, the kind that kicks ass with words rather than kicks.

« Older Entries
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.