Sitting down to my computer this morning I felt compelled to do some freewriting, just to string together some sentences and see what would bubble to the surface. I have been preoccupied with finishing two poetry manuscripts that I hope will eventually see the light of day, along with editing an indie documentary film. As a result, I’ve had to take a break from working on my long-term memoir-in-progress, so I’ve missed writing prose.

I don’t have anything profound to say in this post, except something that will be obvious to many of you—that writers need to trick themselves into creating something, abandoning the editor voice in their heads and just letting the ideas rip. Writers need to give themselves permission to write bad sentences, bad paragraphs and bad first drafts—all of which can be fixed later.

On this morning, my three-year-old son is sleeping nearby, and I hope my tapping on the keyboard will not awaken him. The coffee pot is fired up and I am ready to face another day.

This freewriting exercise may not have been very productive; it yielded no potential literary heroines or ideas for publishable works. But seeing the clumps of words accrued on the computer screen still pleases me.

I also wanted to post something fresh because I’ve switched to a new theme—Ryu—after being inspired by seeing Muhammad Shahab’s clean and elegant blog.