(Good catch on the title. I owe you for that one.)

Look, I’ll take what I can get. Beggers can’t be choosers. Reminding me of death and destruction only tends to make me look at the bigger picture in life and how someday before I take my last breath, I’d like to say that I actually did what I set out to do. Write a novel. Get published. Feel like I’ve accomplished a sliver of the dream. January is filled with all these things you have to do every year (taxes, ugh) and just serves as a reminder that another year has passed and I’ve yet to accomplish what I’ve set out to do in my life.

I made a promise to myself this year that come hell or high water I’m going to jump out into the deep end and get it done. I have the means to do it. I have the ability to accomplish my goal. Now I have to figure out a way to beat my mind at its own game. Even if I drown trying to get there, at least I can say I attempted it.

Writing is mental war. Just like anything else, writing is worth all the sacrifices you have to make to get the end product. It just takes a little will and determination to set out on the path. Yet, I step two feet out onto the path and it feels like I’m sinking into quicksand. Four years ago, if you’d asked me if I’d contemplate writing a novel I’d made a very rude unladylike remark and laughed you all the way out the door. A lot of things change in four years. People change. Lives change. Circumstances change. Determination waivers. Critics and haters bum you out and make you second guess everything you’ve ever done. But your heart is always the same no matter what happens. Use your heart to rule over your mind. Your heart will always find a way.

I’ve always found a way. When I was a child, my mama told me I was the most bull-headed stubbornest child she’d ever come across. I don’t put off things to do tomorrow when I can do it today. I don’t drag my feet when it comes to responsibility. I spent most of my teenage years living life full speed ahead, yet since I’ve gotten to be an adult, I’ve lost touch with the very thing that makes me… Me. That spark is what lit my fire in those early days of writing. All the pain and sadness and loneliness, fear I poured into my characters. The newness of finding my voice and finding a rhythm helped me when nothing else would’ve touched me. I felt alive through them. I want to feel that again. I want my pages to feel like life. I want the reader to feel moved and touched and as if they just lived through the story.

Instead, I’m floating around in fiction land without an anchor, inspiration lit up like a beacon in the distance and the wind is pulling me in the opposite direction.

I’m planting my feet into the sand this year. If I died tomorrow, I wouldn’t have a damned thing written. It’s so pathetic. A waste of all that time and effort for nothing just because I have issues with admitting when I need help. When I need a push in the right direction. All that stubbornness is coming back to bite me in the ass. If I died tomorrow all the words inside my head would die too and for me after the worlds I’ve shifted through and characters I’ve built up that would be a shame. I just needed a reminder of what I need to accomplish. Sometimes the reminders just come in the saddest way possible.

While I realize that this is a horribly personal blog for the day, (believe me, I even debated hiding this in a dark corner and pretending I never wrote it) I think a part of my promise to myself is to be more open. I’ve spent years closed down because it was the only way to manage how I really felt about how the world turns around me. The only thing that serves purpose to is drowning out the creativeness. Without emotional ties and connections there is no creativity in the world around me. So here’s to a new year and to a new goal and to me accomplishing something I’m more than capable of accomplishing.

What inspires you? What inspiration do you take from the world around you? Anything ever impacted your ability to write and you found yourself questioning everything you put onto paper? What helped you get past that?