Monkey with a Mission

me.

Me = amateur writer who won’t be quitting my day job just yet.

I’ve loved creative writing since I was a wee one, though my adult writing life has followed a progression from financial analysis reports as a consultant to educational research/literary analysis essays as a grad student to lesson plans/homework assignments as a high school English teacher to blogging about London as an expat to now also polishing manuscripts as a developmental editor.

I’ve dappled in short stories, but my primary creative outlet these days is novel-length fiction. I’ve completed my first manuscript and continue revising it, while the bud of a second one is ricocheting off the sides of my skull like a Mexican jumping bean. Yet for as many ideas as I scribble on napkins, envelopes, and journal pages and try to piece together on the computer screen, I do hit a block now and then, and a writer cannot sit and wait around for inspiration—we become better writers by writing often.  Writing is inspired, but it is also a discipline. So…

my blog.

Years ago, I’d purchased Bonni Goldberg’s book entitled Room to Write. Along with this, I had purchased a journal in which I was all-out motivated to transcribe my responses to the prompts. I think I tried it once. Then life got busy. Then the excuses ran rampant. Then what free time I did scrape together for myself got pissed away by more excuses, flung left and right like so much excrement in a zoo cage.

The Monkey said, “Enough.” Why it had fallen from the tree in the first place is irrelevant; it has picked itself up and grabbed hold of the vine again.

I’d thereby instituted this blog in January 2010 as my regimen, my detox, my stamina-fortifying daily banana…well, at least once a week. Fair enough? At any rate, I’ve never pretended to be innovative here—I write about writing, and I write about editing. And when I’m not writing about writing or editing, my posts are responses to prompts from Room to Write. Those aren’t meant to be polished and final pieces, only a freely written brainstorm when the monkey wrench needs oiling.

So grab a vine and swing on over to groom my posts for fleas, and by all means infest it with your own (i.e., contribute your comments and writing)!