I’m sitting here contemplating the last two years as a writer. Can I take you back to when it all began? Of course I can. I am writing this damn blog. Anyway, when I started writing my first novel, Awoken, it was like I was picked up by a spaceship. I was worried, and then again not at all, that something had happened to me. I was infected. All I wanted to do was write about these characters in my head. They were a part of me suddenly. And it was like overnight I’d been changed. It was beautiful…and bewildering. And I was worried. I was absolutely terrified that whatever had happened to me was going to stop. That the writing monster would vacate my system suddenly. That I’d be abandoned halfway through this book with no creative inspiration.

So I kept up the regimen. I kept taking the vitamin B complex. I drank lots of water. I exercised. I meditated. I did whatever it took so that the creative juices kept flowing. Here’s what I’m telling you for the first time. I thought I’d been given a secret location. Like writing is a place where you’re invited to and can also be banished from by little gnomes.

And now I’ll tell you what I know to be true. Writing is a place where you invite yourself. You’re only there as long as you wish to be. And  you, the writer, are the biggest distractor.

I’ve quit the vitamins since. I don’t sleep…not really. I exercise, but that’s a totally different blog post. And I drink water, because that’s life sustaining. But I know now that the stories that come through me are a part of something that I’ve allowed, not something that’s suddenly happened to me.

So plug in people, there’s a story in you.