If you wait for inspiration to write, you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter.

Dan Poynter - American author, consultant, publisher, professional speaker and parachute designer.

 PARACHUTE DESIGNER? I bet he just put that in to make himself sound more interesting.

Stick to the day job, Dan. That's my advice.

Best regards,

Caroline Coxon 
(British writer, housewife, mother and worm charmer...)

Yesterday was a great day. All day long, I felt inspired.

by Dkim on Etsy

I didn't write anything.

But I felt inspired.

Well, it's a start.

Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.

Good ole Gloria Steinem. (Tsk tsk, now I'll have to see who she is, exactly. I just CAN'T do it - quote from someone I don't know anything about, except I have heard her name.)

Jewish-American feminist icon, journalist and women's rights advocate. Well, that'll do for me.

My dreams are back. Hooray. They've been submerged under a pile of rubbish (that's the polite version) for the last couple of weeks.

Peter The Glass Half Empty Man always says to me that dreams are unrealistic, that people who follow dreams are delusional, that if I dream I'll only be disappointed. 

I think he should listen to Gloria Steinem.

Or me.

If you don't know history, then you don't know anything.

You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree...said Michael Crichton, and that's much how I felt having watched Lincoln last night - wanting to see for myself what all the fuss was about, prior to The Oscars.

I was horribly confused by Democrats and Republicans in that film. I was sure in my own mind, based on following current affairs, that it would have been the Democrats that were the Abolitionists, not the Republicans. More study required...

Spot the real Lincoln...Daniel Day Lewis was simply mind-blowingly incredible in the role (and I tried very hard not to be swept along by the hype - but it was impossible not to be in total awe.)

 

I loved what Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian film reviewer, said: "And what a feat from Day-Lewis: the nearest thing a 21st-century biopic can get to a seance."

As a screenplay writer myself, she says, laughing hollowly at considering herself in the same breath as, in this case, Tony Kushner, I was interested in its history. The screenplay's history, I mean, as well as Lincoln's.

Based in part on Doris Kearns Goodwin's biography of Lincoln, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,  the screenplay was first written by John Logan in 2001, then another version was commissioned, this time to be written by playwright Paul Webb, around 2006. Spielberg was still dissatisfied. In 2008, I think, Tony Kushner was hired.

His first draft was FIVE HUNDRED PAGES (a screenplay is usually about 100-120!) 

He joked he was on his "967,000th book about Abraham Lincoln," and finally narrowed the plot down to the two months in Lincoln's life when he was preoccupied with adopting the Thirteenth Amendment.

Filming must have taken place in 2012 - more than ten years after the first screenplay was written.

I think perhaps I get too impatient too quickly!

Words can be twisted into any shape.

Promises can be made to lull the heart and seduce the soul. In the final analysis, words mean nothing. They are labels we give things in an effort to wrap our puny little brains around their underlying natures, when ninety-nine percent of the time the totality of the reality is an entirely different beast. The wisest man is the silent one. Examine his actions. Judge him by them.

 Karen Marie Moning, New York Times Bestselling Author of the urban fantasy Fever series. Which I haven't read, nor even heard of...until now.

So, had you noticed? - I've been plagued with terminal lethargy for the past week or so, unable to do anything, write anything, think anything very much.

Today, it was snowing and there was a bitter easterly wind.

93.7% of me didn't want to go for a ride on the forest. 100% of Alfie agreed with me - that pony has his share of common-sense and self-preservation.

The 6.3% that made me go was a sanity-saver.

My toes froze, my fingers froze, my face froze BUT

...my spirit lifted

and took flight!

There really isn't anything to beat taking actions instead of getting stuck in your head having meaningless conversations with yourself.

Your head is where ideas go to die!

From a Dilbert comic strip, written just for me...

...today.

Ever had that feeling that you don't have any? Feelings, that is. Thoughts. Ideas.

I do. Honestly, I write a blog every single day of my life and I very, very rarely pause for longer than a millisecond in thought before an idea comes gushing out all over the page and all the random associations that my brain dreams up, with its weird synapses.

Not today.

My brain is full of glue.

I need to get busy with tasks that can be carried out without using the brain. Like polishing the dog or vacuuming the flowerbed and similar. Wait a minute...

In the meantime, this made me smile.

Well, it's a start...

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement.

 Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth... But amusing? Never.

Edna Ferber.

 Discuss. Not Edna Ferber, but her statement.

Yep, pretty accurate. Except it CAN be fun, it CAN be amusing. There's very little to beat the sensation of being in the zone when writing, when words flow with ease, without conscious effort and with the ability to surprise because, even as the writer, I don't know where the thoughts came from.

Perhaps it's for those precious moments that we keep on writing?

I think I've had a lightbulb moment.

I love writing. I DO write for my own amusement. (Okay, call me an amateur if you must, Edna Ferber.) But when I've finished a piece of work it becomes Something That I Must Do Something With - something that I must try to get published or produced as a film or broadcast as a radio play - or whatever.

THAT'S when it becomes a struggle.

What a fool, quoth she, am I, thus to lie in a stinking dungeon, when I may as well walk at liberty!

 I have a key in my bosom, called Promise, that will, I am persuaded, open any lock in Doubting Castle.

My favourite hymn, when I was but a small girl in school. This is a very jolly version. The school version was about half the speed and dragged along as only school hymns can. Still, I found it uplifting. The puritan in me.

I'm not a great one for lying in stinking dungeons or indeed, for telling the truth - so how about I start?

The stinking dungeon, in my life, is peopled with certain acquaintances who feel the need to snipe and sneer. Not at me. No, I don't mean that. At personalities. At politicians. At TV programmes. At people with a positive outlook on life, which is somehow considered to be naive. At others who are simply trying their best. At anyone at all who seems to them to be fair game - often people without the necessary intellectual capacity or opportunity to join in, to construct witty ripostes.

Maybe it's something  to do with the internet which, apparently, offers people carte blanche to say exactly what they like, however cutting and unpleasant.

I tell you what, too much of it drags me down.

It's a matter of integrity to me. I feel tainted. I don't think it's clever.

This is what I want to say:

(Well, except I don't want to say Anne Sexton)

Me coming out of stinking dungeon in Doubting Castle...

Fighting.