Impromptu blog break

Last Tuesday I felt a pressing need to take a break from writing. I'll return to the theme, Cleveland in Five Senses, in a couple of weeks.

What did I do last week? Well, I tried to spend as little time online as possible. I remembered what it was like before I had TV or Internet -- what did I use to distract myself? And the answer was ... nothing. I didn't distract myself. I just did stuff.

So last week I just did stuff, and I read. I went into the basement where there are no clocks and I read from dawn until dark.

It felt wonderful.

There are only two things in life that have ever made me deeply, soul-thrillingly excited to be alive. Those things are reading and writing. But somewhere between the ages of 14 and 28 I developed a complicated relationship with both. I went from being a kid who read voraciously and wrote with abandon to a sullen adolescent with an inflated ego who reluctantly read only what was assigned and who wrote nothing.

I'm trying to fix this but it's slow going. It's been much easier to learn to love reading, unsurprisingly. Writing is the hard one. Writing is what I'm in charge of, and even when I'm delighted by my own story ideas I find them exhausting to be around, like children.