To a Monastery . . .

I'll be at a monastery this coming week, in my own little hermitage in the woods. Listening Point, a hermitage ministry on 80 wooded acres with beach access near Erie, Pennsylvania, will be where I wake up to yoga, pray and breakfast with the sisters of Mount Saint Benedict Monastery, walk, and write. My hope is to work on a memoir and a book on writing. I will be changed by a week of solitude. I will be with God, my muse.

Writing Life

If you don’t know where to begin, where to start up a true writing life, just write.  Write every day, retreat from the world in the cocoon that envelopes you and the words that you need to get out, the words that will die inside you if you don’t let them out, the words that might just cause you to blow up like a balloon and burst and fizzle out to nothing if you don’t allow them to be written.  Let the words be your own private retreat.

How To Manage All This Stuff

I asked my on-line writing group whether I had to do it all--blogging, e-mail marketing, Facebook, Linked In, Twitter--and they said I do. This was yesterday after having a real heart-to-heart with my husband about having too much to do. Instead of letting it get me down, I got busy. I had a social networking day and sent out an e-mail about the Fall retreat and book appearances, and put announcements on Facebook and Linked In. I saved blogging until this morning, and I'm glad I did because someone from that same on-line group told me she has multiple blogs as well and blogs on each once a week, and it works out because each blog has a purpose and she uses the blog to get her going on the project she'll work on that day. Not only did I move forward on my social networking chores over the last two days but I did so knowing how helpful my social networking was to me. I hope this blog post serves you well.  

“All serious daring starts within.” –Eudora Welty

C. S. Lewis wrote, “People read to know they are not alone.”  We write for the same reason. We love words because they are our way of communicating with the world, whether we’re hearing the stories or telling them. The reading and the writing are intertwined like a well-written story so that the writer becomes the reader and the reader gets into the writer’s head.