This has certainly been the year of lax blogging on my part. And it’s not like I haven’t had things to write about. It’s just that I put off writing an entry, and then more things happen that I want to write about, except I can’t write about those things until I write about the first thing, and the list of topics I really should have covered keeps growing and growing and then…then something bad happens in my life and it all just gets overwhelming. I wanted to write about losing Sebastian here but every time I thought about it, my brain just froze, and then one week passed, and a second, and bang, without warning, another cat gone, and how the hell do I backtrack for all the good, happy things I’ve been doing this summer when there is this double loss to deal with instead. I wrote about one; how is it that I cannot seem to write about the other?

I miss writing. Any kind of writing. When I was in school I used to carry spiral bound notebooks with me everywhere and I was always scribbling stories. My head used to be full of so many stories that I could barely get them all down, and then one day I woke up and discovered that they were gone. How does a person lose something that should never be capable of being lost? And I miss writing here, sharing pictures and stories and being able to look back, years later, to remind myself of things I want to never forget. There are ten years of my life recorded on this little corner of the web; why is it now so hard to do what used to come so naturally?

Today is the first day of wiping the slate clean; of finding my way back. Not only have I signed up for Nanowrimo again, after an eight year hiatus comprised of writer’s block on an epic scale; I have committed myself to NaBloPoMo for the month of November as well. I’m doing this on the theory that if one doesn’t get me over my writing malaise, the other will.

I did no planning for Nanowrimo this time. I deliberately avoided any thinking about plot or characters or genre, because I’ve tried that before, and oh my goodness, how spectacularly that failed. My plan was to simply wait until the stroke of midnight on October 31st, and then sit down in front of my computer and start to write. And I will admit that ever since I signed up for this again, a very large part of me has been afraid that I would stare at that blank screen and nothing would come out.

Total word count for Nanowrimo so far: 4,222. Only 45,782 words to go.