The Harpies Mugged my Muse

The Harpies mugged my Muse.  They pushed her down, knocked her over the head, tied her up in a gunnysack and tossed her in the Marianas Trench.  It’s taken awhile, but she’s back now, back with a vengeance.

On May 7^th, 2012 I moved into my car, where I stayed for 7 months.  I was working at Bellevue College at the time.  Try teaching two computer programming classes while staying in your car with your cat.  It was, to say the least, interesting, and I have to be careful about what I say about this.

I missed that evening’s NCWA meeting, but I continued to write.  After Spring term ended, I took my Qosmio laptop to the local Starbucks, and library, and wrote, edited, re-wrote, and read and took notes for other writing, until the Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut on December 14^th.  Slowly but surely the Lord has put the desire back in me to start up my writing again.  My friend Gigi Murfit from NCWA did a devotional at the April 1^st, 2013 meeting which really helped me to not give up altogether and throw my writing in the trash bin.

Shortly after writing my previous post some two years ago, I was gifted with a Writer’s Renewal Conference scholarship by the NCWA board.  Last year I was asked to volunteer at the conference, and I would have gotten a 50% discount off the conference cost, but because of moving into my car so close to last year’s conference I ended up not able to go and help.  Recently my friend Judy notified me that an unnamed someone had provided another conference scholarship for me. (The title of this article comes from a workshop at the conference.)

About the time I started digging through some of my writing to find an old short story to take and get critiqued, my Qosmio started dying again, and I don’t think I can resuscitate it this time.  I have to once more go through old files to move and sort them.  I gave a talk on March 18^th, 2013 about using Google Drive, and am making a concerted effort to get some cloud services set up so I can keep from having to do this in the future.

While going through these old files and trying to get cloud technology set up I started re-reading my old blog posts, and this was the final straw and I got the itch to write again, and once I get the itch I have to write. 

My last word?  If God doesn’t stop dragging me off to these writing conferences I might just start thinking He wants me to work on being a writer.  I told Him I would go where He wants me to go, never thinking it might mean something like this.  Maybe I’ll be able to fend of the Harpies a bit longer this go ‘round.