Words on Words

I've been writing my whole life, since I can remember. When I was 7, my best friend got Harriet the Spy for her birthday and from then on we carried around notebooks and wrote everything down. The last time I ran into her, which was a couple of years ago, she asks me, "You're still writing?"

"Well yeah."

It's in my blood. My mother tried to write a book when she was my age, and she's always loved writing, so I think that's where it comes from.

 Lately I haven't written as much, maybe because my creativity has taken different forms, through video, photography, what have you. But I miss the written word. I haven't read a new book since Mockingjay. Really. That was the last book I read. That's horrific. My bookworm friends would be stoning me right now if they knew that I haven't read a new book in over a year. That could be why I haven't written anything either. 

It took me buying a completely new notebook to want to sit down and write something. A completely fresh, empty, new notebook waiting to be filled. 

Last weekend I attended a show with my friend Raven. A friend of mine, Gabe Much was playing a album release/going away party at Q Cafe, and I didn't want to miss the last chance to see him before he went to Europe for 6 months for his studies. At the show, we not only saw a few amazing songwriters, but also a couple spoken word poets that blew me away. I sat there in awe of these kids' talent, and as I drove home I found myself wanting so badly to write something down. 

I want to write. Whether it be a script for a video, a short story, a poem, or just incoherent thoughts, I want to write them down. I've lived so much of my life online in the last couple of years, that there isn't a lot of what I've written down that is only mine. That could be my downfall. I haven't written anything that gets to permeate within my own self before being released to the world. All the thoughts I have just gets released instantly to Tumblr, or Twitter, or to this here blog.

I've made myself a new promise - I'm going to take the rest of this year to write for myself. It doesn't mean that I'm going to stop writing here, but I don't need to post everything. Everything I write isn't good enough to release to the world, and I need to take the time to craft something beautiful, and not just spit it right out. Songwriters don't perform songs as they write them. They take the time to polish them and make them beautiful. Having so many songwriters for friends makes me feel inadequate very often, and I want to make something that I'm happy with. I don't want to just be proud of myself, but I want my friends to be proud of me, too.

So that's what I'm going to do. This pretty little notebook will soon be filled with poems, thoughts, journalings, doodles, whatever the hell I want to put it in, because I can do what I want. It will be for my eyes. And my eyes only. And that's okay.