Hello World

"Hello World.  How've you been?  Good to see you my old friend."

Last night was one stop on Lady Antebellum's We Own the Night tour with Darius Rucker and Thompson Square and I must say that it was one of the best concerts that I have been to.  Music has always been a great outlet for me...just like writing.  That's why I write best by putting my iTunes library on shuffle and spending the night writing and listening to music.  Last night though was so amazing.  I love Thompson Square and it was great getting to see them, and Darius Rucker just blew me away (especially with his song, Southern State of Mind and his rendition of Hank Jr.'s "Family Tradition").  But the energy that Lady A had on stage was just incredible and lit up the entire sold-out arena.  And their song, "Hello World" was so inspiring to hear live.  

The weird thing was that I wasn't even going to the concert.  My friend and I had tried to buy tickets a month ago and we couldn't get seats.  This past week, I was listening to the radio at work, and they were giving away tickets to the 24th caller and you had to name the 6 hottest songs that they had just played and the artist who sang them.  I figured, what did I have to lose by calling in?  The first two times it was busy, but the third time, there was a pause, and then a ring, and then someone picked up on the other end.  After a lot of freaking out and jumping around the office, I named off the six songs and won a pair of tickets to the sold-out concert.  I've called countless times before for various concerts and had never won that it almost stopped me from calling this time, but I'm so glad I did.

There was a reason I was at the concert last night, a reason why I got to feel the energy from the stage through the whole crowd.  It's left me feeling motivated and inspired and alive.

"Hello World."

Thought for the Day

"I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten--happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another."  Brenda Ueland

This is not specific to writing.  This quote can be applied to any job or career, and really, to any area of life.  I really don't have much to add to this.  I think it speaks for itself.  I will end with these few thoughts though:

Do what makes you happy.

Live your life doing things that you love.

I love writing.  There are times, yes, where it gets tedious and I just don't want to do it.  There are other times though, when I sit down at my computer and get so wrapped up in the story, so involved with the lives of my characters, I feel like I never want to leave their world, my world, the world that I created.

That's the great thing about being a writer.  Writers hold the power in their hand to make whole worlds and nothing can hold us back except the limits of our own imaginations.  We hold the power to take readers to new and exciting places and meet exotic characters that they just can't help but fall in love with.

I love the feeling I get when I become lost in a book that I'm reading...but when that book is the one that I'm writing, I have this hope that maybe someone else will feel the same way I do when they read it.  They'll fall right into it, right into every scene with my characters, living their story with them, as if it was their own.

So, maybe I did have more to say on this than I thought, but the main point I'm trying to make is be happy, and do things that keep you happy.  And if you're doing something you love, and you're just not happy with it, take a break.  Get away.  Take a road trip for a day and go up to that mountain top, or go stick your feet in the ocean.  Clear your head.  And then, just sit down and write.  Maybe it's not what you're supposed to be working on and maybe that deadline is looming awfully close.  But write for you.  Get lost in your writing all over again.  Remember why it used to make you happy.

Find your spark.  Lose yourself in your writing and find your happiness inside.

Megg

Thought for the Day

"I love deadlines.  I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."  Douglas Adams

This one's for you.

You know who you are.

Mid-Year Check In

So it is now June in the glorious year of 2012.  This also happens to be my first post of the year...I get the feeling that I'm doing something wrong here...

The good news is I have been diligently writing, even though I haven't been keeping up with my posts on here.  The trick now is to merge my 27 documents (or so) into one.  Hopefully, once this happens and I help all these individual scenes fit into the my manuscript, my thoughts will be much more organized and I'll be able to clearly map out where I go from there (not that I'll follow it, but at least I'll have a guideline to throw out the window).

So here's to a fabulous 2012 (well the rest of it...the first half has been pretty fabulous already though), and I know the one thing that would make this year absolutely fantastic would be to finish my manuscript.  And I intend to do just that.

Megg