500 Words, He Said

May 19th, 2015

 Joslyn Hamilton, freelance book editor, Salt Lake City, Utah

Now that I have baby twins and am back to work, I can’t even find the time to make a phone call or try a new recipe. I use my microwave now and still usually end up chugging my tea down in one sip, lukewarm, a half hour after the third time I reheated it in the machine. Recently, I’ve also had a terrible head cold and been getting less sleep as my 4-month-old girls have started teething and “exploring their full vocal range” at night.  

It’s not a good time to take on a creative project, and the honest truth is that I haven’t really been writing at all for the last year as I turned my creative forces inward to make humans, from scratch.

But a friend of mine issued a creative mandate, and for some reason I can’t resist:

500 words a day, for 30 days.

This is not a new concept. It’s straight from The Artists’s Way in the form of  “morning pages”—stream-of-consciousness writing to just get it all out—and a process I have undergone many times in my creative life. If you look to the right, there is even an “Artist’s Way” category you can click on.

But the catch here is that I have to publish the 500 words every day. Which is tricky, because I don’t have much to say these days that’s not about burp cloths and baby outfits. And I swore to myself I wouldn’t become a mommy blogger. I love mommy bloggers and follow tons of them, but unless you have something really specific to say—a new angle on an age-old condition—they can devolve toward the self-involved pretty quickly.

I’m not sure I have anything new to say. Yes, I have twins (weirdly possibly identical) at 43. Yes, I’m a California hippie expatriated to Utah for love. Yes, I’m mentally writing a book called I Don’t Care How You Did It In the 70s as a follow-up to my mom’s 3-month visit recently.

Sidebar: I could not have made it through the first three months of my children’s lives if not for my mom. She is a wonderful gramma (don’t call her “Gramma”) and an amazing, thoughtful, competent, and creative woman herself. She is just waaaaaaaay more laidback than me. Case in point: she doesn’t understand my Tupperware-organization schema at all and, a month after her departure, I am still finding spice jars in the cabinet whose lids are not screwed on.

I feel compelled to do this because, if I’m being honest, I’m the one who told my friend he needs to write every day. And when I told him that, I had a hunch I was actually talking to myself.

Stay tuned to find out if I actually do have anything to say. And for lots of self-indulgent baby pics like the one above. (If you really can’t get enough, follow me on Instagram. Lots more of that sort of thing.)

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3 Responses to “500 Words, He Said”

  1. kirk says:

    amazing. i already want to read more.

  2. Bria says:

    Can’t wait!

  3. Sydney says:

    I totally care how it was done in the 70s. Hopefully with more wine? Keep ‘em coming, lady.

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