THE LATEST

Short Takes include random posts that sometimes arise out of a day with a bad case of writer's block. On those days, I still have to write. That's how you break out of Writer's Block: you write anyway, whether you want to or not. If you focus on your inability to write the next chapter in your next book, you only think about the problem, not what's happening with your characters. Granted, you may not write anything worth reading, but you may write something that's worth reading, just not of the quality you're looking for to put in your current book. Some of my Short Takes come out of days when I have to write, even though I don't quite feel like it. Fake it till you make it can actually work. Sometimes. 

Since retiring from working in my upstairs home office, I can occasionally get away with short stints without writing. I can take some time and play word games while baking some scones, cookies, or English muffins, or after mixing up a batch of pizza dough to keep us in Friday Night Pizza for a few weeks. 

I should tell you that I don't write with the hopes of becoming famous. That would require me to work again. I'm on the cusp of turning 70, and I'd like some free time now, thank you. It boggles the mind to think that I've been working for 55 years! When I was about 15, I worked in my high school's athletic department, in the laundry, washing, drying, and folding towels for the most part, but also uniforms for the football team. I don't remember doing the basketball or baseball uniforms, so they must have had their own people to handle that. (Squirrel!)

I write because I have words inside that want to come out. Then, after I write those words, my brain wants to put them in a different or better order, choose better descriptive words, or correct my sentence structure, spelling, and verb tenses. So, for me, writing is a constant release of creativity followed by almost never-ending touching up, a process better known as editing. 

In a large, rambling nutshell, that's what Short Takes are: stories too short to be full-blown stories for an anthology, and way too short to be a novella or novel. They can be a peek inside my head to see what kind of weird thoughts I have racing around inside. The problem with Short Takes is I sometimes don't know when to quit. Like this ...