JUST WRITE SOMETHING, DANG IT!

The month of July was a  terrible one for writing. We were gone on vacation for most of it, and then when we got back, our laptop decided to no longer allow us to view the screen. We call it the "white screen of death", when instead of fading to black, like any other self respecting laptop does when it is dying, it fades to white; a thick, impenetrable haze that keeps me from my written words.

I'll admit, I got lazy. I had been moving stuff to "the cloud", to GoogleDocs, where I could access them from any computer anywhere, even my smartphone if I needed to in a pinch. But after my writer's retreat, I came home to crisis, a dead AC unit during the unforgiving heat of an Arizona desert. The we left for the mountains of Utah, where I didn't take the laptop because there would be no reception. And I forgot. And paying the price now. (So word to the wise: BACK IT UP!!!!!)

Anyway, I've been kinda depressed, since my current WIP is trapped on the nonresponsive laptop. And with school starting and no extra funds for computer repair/replacement, I've been stuck.

But I needed to write. Something. Anything. And this was something new for me. There have been other roadblocks in my writing life before, but for the first time, I didn't see it as a permanent stop, just a temporary setback. Which says a lot about how I've changed over the past couple of years. I find that deep inside, I cannot quit. Failure is not an option. I must make due with whatever I have to keep the writing juice flowing within me. So I've written journal entries. Short stories. More of my synopsis of my story. Background of my characters. Anything to fill the empty space my dead computer left behind from its ghostly hand.

One of the pivotal movies of our married life was "Apollo 13" starring Tom Hanks. Released in the summer of 1995, the year we got married, it was a movie that defined our early years of marriage. It recounts the true experience of the Apollo 13 astronauts on their near fatal trip to the moon, and the scientists who made their safe return home possible.

I wanted to share a clip with you, if only to share how I feel about writing. Lives are at stake. My life is at stake. And I am willing to do whatever it takes to come through. Even make a square peg fit into a round hole.