I promised myself I would ‘blog’ here every single week. I would create a post, a literary non-fiction essay I like to call them, since ‘post’ sounds so bite-sized, and I am a Type-A overachiever who has to do everything notably. Of course, as usual, I have topics and words crashing my head in relation to my everyday life–what I see and hear, taste, touch, remember. Even when I sleep, this odd characteristic of thinking more fully about moments and information than I need to goes on. Negressions would be a funnel for some of this. I jumped in here to notate sentences, names and ideas (writers used to do this in moleskin journals tucked in shirt pockets or clothbound notebooks placed by the bedside). I am planning to dedicate some space in here to great women in literature and the arts such as the late Barbara Christian and Joan Daves, and current greats such as Susan Sarandon and Lupita Nyong’o, and even awesome friends who create. But alas, I have not blogged about any of it.
That is because something strange has been happening: I have been writing.
It’s true.
For quite some time now, it has been hard to concentrate on too much of anything else because I have been building letters into words and words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into pages and pages into sections and sections into an assortment of connected narratives and connective narratives into forms a person beyond myself can understand and forms into objects audiences may possibly relate to. This is hard work. This is daylong work. It is often nightlong work. It is detail-oriented and painstaking work. It is emotional work. It is non-stop work, as the tree branches cease to be tree branches but become messages on how a character should hold his or her arms. Even my feet slapping the floor en route to the bathroom is a message on how something can sound. Anything. It is indescribable and unique and unscheduled work. It is not for wimps.
As I near the end of much of this work, at least for now until the next storm of it arrives, and I feel comfortable enough to rear my head in other places once more, only now do I feel it is satisfying work. Up until now, it has only felt grueling and depressing and endless to think this is my calling in life–but I love it anyway, and I am not going to stop. Not to mention, I can never say it is “unfair” work–not coming from the ancestors and legacies I come from. How in the world did I wind up lucky enough to be able to create a life and work from nothing but thoughts in my head that God has given man the tools to be able to record? It’s hard for me to complain too much. I imagine picking cotton was harder. (Image Courtesy of AndreaBalt.com/30 Days of Writing- The Daily Muse)
negression 