Just a quick check-in to say hi and apologize for my inattention to your posts. I love your work and take something away from every post I read. Your words and writing inspire me and lead me to aspire to write better.

My absence is not without purpose: I’m engrossed in editing my novel, A Wished-For Love, and I’m zooming right along. I feel like I’ve finally nailed it with the story (don’t we all?), and plan to pitch my story to as many agents as I can during the Savvy Authors PitchFest, 14-16 February. I hope I get a bite and a request for my full manuscript. Fingers xxxx’ed!

I try to spend time each day reading the latest posts from you, my followers and writing buddies, and supporting you in your endeavor to reach more people with your insights into life and love. I thought checking out books at the library, reading articles on line, or eavesdropping on conversations at my coffee shop gave me the best insights into what life is about, but I was wrong; the posts I read here are the real stories of what happens on this planet we call Earth. Each if you is a teller of tales, a shaman of written history, an observer of life. You are the scribes who write the stories people will read ten thousand years from now. Your words are not edited, but are pure, honest, open, unadulterated by second opinion or second thoughts.

For the most part, you–we–are not professional writers, but everyday folks going about your lives in much the same way your parents did, and your grandparents did, and their parents before them. You live, love, cry, laugh, smile, cringe, blush, scream, and lash out the way humans have done for thousands of years, but you write about it from the heart. Something inside drives you to release the words, the emotions, the thoughts and feelings  inside you, the tension of life, the humor in the corner next to the shade of anger that presses down on your heart and begs for relief and release. Something unique to us–you and me–makes us want to write things down.

Your ancestors did much the same thing, but did it in letters written in ink in longhand on precious sheets of paper that cost hard-earned money, and mailed with stamps purchased with coins from the cookie jar stashed on a high shelf in the kitchen. Life savings. Emergency funds. Money for school clothes, and maybe a gift for each child at Christmas. Letters were an extravagance, an indulgence, an expense purchased with love. My ancestors crossed the plains in covered wagons. How often did letters from loved ones back home not reach them due to hardship, flood, famine, death? How often was a letter the only contact between mother and daughter for years until Mother died without ever seeing Daughter again? An Irish Wake was a funeral rite given for a son leaving Ireland whom the family knew they would most likely never see again. An occasional letter might reach Mom or Son and be answered. Or not.

Ahhh, we are fortunate to live in a world where Mother can Skype her dear son or daughter. Where letters pass each other in transit. Where the internet connects us as though we live next door to one another. In Hawaii, I lived in a home so close to my neighbor that I could almost reach out my window and help my neighbor wash the dishes in her own kitchen. That’s the world we live in today: a small world, not one of unknown distances and travails, but a world where you can always phone home (unless AT&T is your carrier 🙂 no matter where you happen to be at any given moment.

Writing is our link to the past and to the future, to our old selves and to our new selves. Writing allows us to remember in the future what we felt long ago. Writing lets us tell our children where they came from, what made them, who they are, what we hoped they would be. Writing connects history and future. Writing is the link between life and death, now and then. Writing is permanent. Writing is eternal life. Writing is eternal life.

Don’t stop telling your stories. If you live on a pleasant street, are easily aroused, if you’re a calm kate, if you tell truly, madly, ordinary stories, feel your life is a ragazza-like mess, or want to tessellate with others, if you’re all eyes and words, if you’re a merry fairy or a tony bologna, or find yourselves under a new spell, then by all means write, write, write. I want to read your stories, I want to read your life, I want to reach out and feel your words like a language in braille so that they guide me and tell me who you are and what you want to be and what you hope your legacy will be, for we all want to leave a legacy that inspires and informs, that says I lived and I died and I want to be remembered.

Words are just words until you write them down. Then they are eternal. “Words are just words until you write them down.” Write them down. Be a scribe. Be a shaman of your time, a teller of truths, a historian of your family. Tell the future who you were so the future hears the voice of the past. Don’t leave Earth forgotten.

I want to give a shout out to my writing friends Anna, Denise, Jackson, Ginette, Robyn, Stephen, Kris, Emma, and Angela. Inspiration comes from many sources, but inspiration mixed with admiration and respect comes from people. These folks are the ones who make my heart bleed and laugh.