Just Write.

For months, I've been wrestling with myself - with my muse, I guess - sometimes trying to write, sometimes trying not to write. In any case, the blank page is indeed like a bull, just like Papa Hemingway said.

Ideas are there. Ideas are always there. It's getting them out the way that I want them that's the hard part.

It's also hard recognizing when something is just a small something, or when it's a larger something, needing time and fleshing out.

Add in the pressure I put on myself to write and it starts to feel like a duty more than a gift.

When I was a kid, I just wrote. That's what I did. I had a Trapper Keeper full of stuff - things I never wanted anyone to see. Sometimes people saw them anyway. But I never had this sort of verbal bottleneck that I have now. If it was there to be written, I wrote it.

It's harder now. I'm sure that part of it is a fear of rejection - part of it's an idea that I know what's "marketable" and what isn't. As if marketability has ever been my reason to write. Writing, for me, has just been what I do. I wrote my first poem at the age of five, and I've never stopped writing since.

Is it crap? Yeah. A lot of it's crap. Some of it is even award-winning crap. One piece is award-winning, published crap. But I wrote it.

I'm trying to remember that writing is what I do. And I'm trying to straighten out the bottleneck.

It's not as easy as it used to be.