Write Yourself Alive

So, in roughly five days (January 29th) I will participate in a month-long online course called “Creative Rehab: Write Yourself Alive” through two main instructors: Andrea Balt and Tyler Knott Gregson. I am excited for January 29th to finally arrive..I’ve been waiting since last July for this online course.

You may ask why I consider this date more important than my birthday and Christmas put together. The first time I took the challenge, it was free and forced me to commit to daily writing for the entire month of July–inspired or not. It is because of my involvement in this challenge that I am the sophisticated visionary I am now 😛 I had been on “hiatus” from non-academic writing for close to ten years before I #writeeverydamnday. Now, I spend most of my time writing, creating, challenging and pressuring myself to learning about the craft of writing.

Before the class starts, I was given a Writer Questionnaire to fill out so that I may start to get to know more about my own process before the “bleeding” begins again. Today, I will reveal to you my answers to the first question:

What are your strengths as a writer? What do you love most about your

talent, or the way words flow out of you, or any aspect of your writing process?

What do you secretly or openly admire most about your writer self?

I think my strengths as a writer stem from personal characteristics like:

• Stubbornness
• Tenacity
• Curiosity
• Questions
• Passion
• Habit
• Thirst for challenges/competition
• Finding connection between seemingly unrelated topics
• Interests in podcasts from listening to NPR a lot as a child
• Tendency to be introverted
• Obsessed with finding out how things work on a technical/mechanical level
• Need to be heard and understood
• Need for an outlet for chaos in my life
• Need for approval for my self induced accomplishments
• Need to make sense of the world/control over something in my life

Also from skills that I learned from my academic days like:

• Researching
• Note-taking
• Classes studied
• Books outlined
• Need for intellectual stimulation
• Summarization
• Over-studying
• My glasses?
• Perfect pairing between music and writing/studying
• Application of previously acquired knowledge
• Insatiable thirst for reading instead of TV or most other things
• Shop talk about thoughts that stem from information learned and analyzed

My ability to continue to need words…language in my life as I need air or water to live. I love the sound of language, its form and shape, its paradoxes as concrete and yet abstract, creation or reanimation of words, lexicon, phonetic alphabet, linguistics. What’s funny is that I started out a long time ago writing poetry..but yet liken reading poetry to looking at a piece of art. Sometimes you connect with it..other times you feel absolutely nothing.

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Thank you for reading my blog. The creation of “Bohemian NERD” is part of a dream come true for me. Take a moment and check out this link. (Hint..has nothing to do with Writing Resources!)

One last thing:

I love to share resources I come across with other people who are passionately “every damn day”. Here is some free information/resources to use as you see fit. Enjoy!

“Fifty Tools that Will Help you in Writing

Impossibly Condensed Checklists for Beginning a Novel

100 Best Websites  for Writers