A shower of words

If you’re a writer or someone who whips up dreams or solves problems, you know how the best brain blasts always come at the most inopportune times—such as when you’re in the shower.

For me it never fails, I’ve slept like a rock, exhausted from writing for days on end, or I’ve tossed and turned all night, listening as my muse tell me where it’s taking me next in my latest written work. The ideas either come or they don’t, but one thing is for certain. As I stand in the shower, the words come pouring down faster than the drops of water. I’m there with no pen, no paper, and a shower of words and ideas that would drown a cruise ship. 

To celebrate a special anniversary last year, my husband tried hard to get me to go to Hawaii—the real place—but because we were planning to move at the time, making job changes, and more, I said, “No, not now, please.”

The week of anniversary rolled around and I drove from our new home in Missouri to the apartment he was renting near his job in Illinois until his pending retirement date. 

We left the apartment one morning to go out for a nice lunch, run some errands, and leave for our destination. 

Remember how I said, “Not Hawaii. Not this year.”

He took me anyway. 

We opened our motel room and saw a rainforest shower, a volcano pouring into our hot tub, a sauna, and a room with thatched roof and tiki torches. We were in Hawaii—on the prairies of Illinois. He’d rented us one of those themed hotel rooms. The atmosphere of the islands was there—for a whole lot less money. 

We, both in our sixties, were like a couple of little kids in that room, hoping from one attraction to the next, giggling when we discovered a bidet in the Jack and Jill bathroom. 

We were having a wonderful time, until I decided to take a shower. This rainforest didn’t just have trees and tropical vegetation painted on the walls, it also had shower heads with all sorts of knobs and spouts and sprayers. I turned it on, and the next thing I knew water was coming at me from everywhere.  It was pounding my yes, drenching my hair, beating against my body. It was liquid sensory overload. 

And, it was a lot like those word showers I have at home, when the story or blog or news article ideas come when I don’t have a waterproof pen and paper, a bucket in which to catch the ideas before they are lost forever down the drain. 

A big fluffy towel helped me to wipe the water from my eyes, to see my Hawaiian room again on that special vacation day. 

Maybe that’s why the torrents of words come pouring down on me at home, so that as I step from the shower, and pat myself dry, the best ideas have soaked through to my core, to fall as thoughts onto a page, helping me to bring my readers to our destinations in the posts within this blog. 

© Ann Tracy Mueller 2013

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A little blog begins a big new journey

This is a scary, happy kind of time for me. A blog that was conceived as a musing on a two-lane highway more than a dozen years ago starts out on a new adventure.

Like the mother I was years ago watching my kindergartners, their tiny little legs climbing great big bus steps, the “Mommy” looking on as the door shut and the yellow monster rounded the corner, I can’t help but wipe away a tear or two. They’re tears of fear for what this new little blog may encounter and tears of joy for what it might become – and, yes, tears of relief that we’ve made it to this point.

My words come back to the pages where they first earned a byline in 1998, at the newspaper that Abraham Lincoln said “was always my friend,” The State Journal-Register. (Actually, he said “The Journal paper…” but that paper lives on in this one today.)

My blog will join those of veteran journalists and other bloggers on the newspaper’s website – and I’m as giddy as a junior-high girl peeking around the corner at the boy of her dreams.

If this is the first time you’ve read my words, welcome. If you read some of them before on the SJ-R Books page, on my Lincoln Buff 2 bicentennial blog, through social media, or in a publication or on a website for which I have written professionally, thanks for joining me again.

This adventure is nearly as new for me as it is for you. “Musings on Route 66” was born as 2012 opened its eyes, born to be a place where I could write about the things that tug at me, where I could share my passions with others.

I’ll tell you about aspects of Illinois history and literature that move me. I’ll write about things that touch me as a baby boomer. I’ll share stories of sensational beings and simple things, including stories about my second-favorite state, Missouri. And, from time to time, I’ll write about that two-lane road that stirred these musings in the first place – or I’ll just “muse” about something that won’t go away until I get it written down.

I’m a lifelong “word nerd,” so I’ll also write about books and quotes that I love or believe are worth sharing.

Because those same words give me great pleasure as a writer, I’ll talk about the craft. My words didn’t get to this page by themselves. Along the way, I had many fine mentors and writers – known well and little-known – encouraging me even when they didn’t realize it, sharing their pointers and guiding the way.

Now, it’s my turn. If you’re a writer or writer wannabe, you’ll want to visit the “Wanna be a writer?” section of my blog for tips that can help guide you as they have me.

If you dropped in today out of curiosity, why don’t you pretend like you’re Mike and Frank from “American Pickers”? Snoop around, climb in the attic, look in the corners. You just never know what might turn up. And, once you head down the road, don’t stay gone long. You never know what new old treasures you might find the next time you drop in.

Thanks for stopping by.

As The Beverly Hillbillies said back in this boomer’s younger days, “Y’all come back, y’hear?”

© Ann Tracy Mueller 2012

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Reflections on reading, writing and ‘rithmetic

“I’m reading about writing, and later I’ll write about reading.”

These words I shared with my husband as I left the living room where he was spending time with old friends – Sunday morning television anchors telling stories he enjoyed – as I went off to read and later create some of my own.

My old friends are on the pages of books.

Instead of reading that morning, I felt drawn to write, to capture right then, on the computer monitor before me, what was floating through my brain.

It wasn’t always that way. I didn’t always have that luxury. But, looking back, now, I know that’s okay.

As a youngster, I fell in love with words. Remember that Little Golden Book, the red book with the one word title, Words? If you don’t, you missed a little bit of magic, I think.

The book has evolved through the years. The version I remember had little boys and girls of the 1940s and 1950s, not too unlike the ones in our “Dick and Jane” primers at school.

Through that book, even before I went off to a big red brick school house, I’d learned to recognize those words, “big” and “red” and more, from that little 25-cent book.

And, as I watched how words could be woven on a page to tell stories, I began to fall in love with them. I loved putting them on paper myself and retrieving them by reading words others had left for me to discover.

Once I found out about numbers, I liked them, too. It was fun to see how numerals worked together, not the same as letters, but in their own unique way. They had an order to them that letters didn’t.

Oh, sure, letters had to march just so onto the page to spell this word or that, and those of us who got them all in the right order, words one through 20 on the spelling list, got a bright shiny, colorful star and a letter A, followed by an arithmetic sign, +. Funny, isn’t it, how even then, back in first grade, numbers and letters, writing and ‘rithmetic, were intertwined.

But there was more latitude with letters, with words. You could mix them up and they still worked. Do that with numbers and you’d have a disaster. No matter how you tried to explain it to the teacher, two plus two were never going to equal five.

Just as those words and numbers were intertwined, so it was to be in my life.

As a senior in high school, trying to decide what my major in college should be, I was torn between the math formulas that kept me mesmerized, nose to the grindstone in Sister Charles Ellen’s math class, and the words that drew me to the page in the Mike Royko articles we studied in Sister Theresa Rose’s journalism class and the contemporary novels we studied in Sister Denise’s senior English class.

In college, I ended up being drawn to my school’s English program. When I left two years later, I spent more than 20 years working with – balancing – numbers everyday as I worked with grocery store ledgers.

In the long run, the call of the words was louder, so when I returned to college in my late 30s, they won out.

Today, as a writer and online editor for a communication news website, I “skip, scan and retrieve” thoughts written in hundreds of online articles each week. Yet, when my time’s my own, as it is more often at this stage of life, I do what I love most.

I read about writing, write about reading and often do either – just because I can.

I still know how to work a mean equation when I have to – but, don’t get too excited, my math-loving friends. I’m not so crazy about ‘rithmetic that I celebrate or count down to “Pi day.”

Carl Sandburg’s birthday, yes. But, wait, what was that one poem he wrote?

Ah, yes … “Arithmetic.”

On second thought, for the sake of all those numbers I juggled, I guess I could at least treat myself to a piece of pie on March 14, couldn’t I?

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No time to read

A writer friend of mine, Jennifer Niven, whose work and work ethic I admire, has a blog called “No time to bowl.”

I won’t steal her story by telling you why it is named so. You can find out for yourself here.

Jennifer’s blog title reminds me of all the years I thought I had “no time to read.” Perhaps you feel the same way.

Here’s what I now know about “no time.”

When I was a little girl, I loved having stories read to me. Later, when I could read myself, I couldn’t get enough of books and the tales they held between their covers.

Heck, I even read between the covers of my bed, using a flashlight to flip through the pages when I was supposed to be sleeping. I kept at that until I started high school, at least. It was then, I think, that boys became nearly as important to me – or perhaps more so – than books.

When I was sixteen, I began to work, going to school by day, cashiering in a grocery store at night. I guess I thought I didn’t have time to “read” anymore. I don’t remember many stolen moments with books in those years.

In college, it seemed most of what I read was that “required” stuff, then I got married had kids and kept working. My reading was limited to the newspaper, a magazine from time to time, and a few books I’d begin here and there when I wasn’t too tired to read.

I really didn’t turn to books again in earnest until I returned to school when I was nearly 40, and even after that, I sometimes went great lengths of time without making it through an entire volume.

It was many years later that I realized that, during those “no time to read” years, I was reading all along.

My job as a cashier in a grocery store, encountering hundreds of people day in and day out, was like an entirely new lending library. Each day was a fresh page upon which I could read not words, but people. They were as different as they were the same, and each encounter, each experience taught me something new, if not about that individual, then about humankind or the way the species interacts, one being with another.

So, where ever you are, what ever you’re doing, unless you’re locked in a cave away from the human race, when you have “no time” to read books, there is something just as interesting to read.

It’s people.

Try it. You might just see what you’ve been missing.

© Ann Tracy Mueller 2012

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A remedy for the wanna-be-a-writer blues

Feeling a little down in the dumps these days?

• You want to be a writer, but you don’t know where to start.
• Your teacher or someone in your writers’ group said you don’t even have enough talent to fill a thimble.
• Your parents or your husband tell you to “get a life,” and while you’re at it, get a job that pays the bills.
• You just got another rejection slip.

Perhaps what you need is a dose of soup, chicken soup. It’s amazing the healing power this old-fashioned remedy can have.

In an earlier blog post, I gave some advice for writer wannabes. I’ve always believed you can not be a writer if you’re not a reader. Reading opens new worlds, spawns ideas, provides examples of what works and what doesn’t as words play together on a page.

If you’re like me, a book brings as much comfort to you as your grandmother’s old cat Snuggles does to her. You “don’t leave home without” one.

You probably already know the books you like and the ones you don’t – the writers who touch you and entertain you and the ones who do absolutely nothing at all for you. Whether you know it or not, you’re learning from each and every one of them – what to do, what not to do, how to build a sentence and when you don’t even need a full sentence.

But there’s one genre of books you don’t want to overlook. They’re books for and about writers. In coming blog posts, I’ll share some of the ones I’ve read and what I’ve learned from each and every one of them.

Yes, even the bad ones have at least one good lesson in them.

If you’re looking for a remedy for what ails you, when you’re doubting yourself as a writer and feel as if everyone else is, too, pick up a copy of Chicken Soup for the Writer’s Soul. It contains 80-some stories about writers, ranging from Ray Bradbury to Richard Paul Evans and Sue Grafton. You’ll read – usually first-hand accounts – of their doubts, determination, willpower, work ethic, struggles, mentors, supporters and more.

But most of all, as you slurp your chicken soup and some of it dribbles down your chin, you’ll know you’re not the first to do so and you won’t be the last. Each of these writers can show you a figurative t-shirt with years of soup stains and another which has emblazoned across the chest, “I’m a writer – and darned proud to be one!”

© Ann Tracy Mueller 2012

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10,000 tweets later

By the time you read this article, I will have hit a milestone. As I write this, I am at 9,999 tweets since I opened my @lincolnbuff2 Twitter account almost three years ago.

The first time I remember tweeting was on the 200^th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, Feb. 12, 2009. I was in a conference room at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum tweeting about an event held in commemoration of the bicentennial.

I’d already been blogging for nearly four months at the time, and I’d heard about this thing, Twitter. I liked the social media interaction on the blog and the way it was helping me spread word about the year-long bicentennial celebration and Lincoln’s life and legacy.

As I sat there next to the back door of the conference room, I wasn’t too sure what I was doing, and the looks I got from others seemed to say, “How rude! Why are you ‘texting’ in the middle of this esteemed scholar’s presentation?”

Their looks of disapproval were enough to make me stop after a handful of tweets and put my phone away.

As the bicentennial year and my social media presence progressed, I became more comfortable on Twitter.

By the time of the Lincoln Forum symposium at Gettysburg in November, I was so comfortable on the social media platform that I was the first person to ever live-tweet a forum lecture. The highlight of my day was when a follower tweeted a question, which I presented in the open-mic Q & A period at the end of the lecture.

Imagine what it felt like to have the presenting scholar say, “Well, I think that’s a forum first!”

It was history—and, somehow, deep in my heart, I was sure Abraham Lincoln himself was looking down, smiling on that moment. I’m convinced the president who was so mesmerized by technology and who spent so many long hours in the telegraph office during the Civil War would be using Twitter himself, if he were here with us today.

Through Twitter, I’ve build friendships around the world, talking social media with an enthusiastic young social media expert from Malaysia, lifting a toast with a cup of Joe from time to time with a cameraman in D.C. and sharing a lemon pie recipe with an author whose work I’ve admired for more than four decades.

In the more than three years since I began my first blog, Lincoln Buff 2, with its 200-plus posts celebrating the sixteenth president, Twitter also led me to a new career, as a co-editor for a health care communication website. The job post listed “lives and breathes social media” as a requirement.

My family will tell you that I do just that.

And now, with my new blog, “Musings on Route 66,” I’ll use my words to share my enthusiasm for other things—such as writing, being a baby boomer, living in Illinois and Missouri, loving old airplanes and steam engines, treasuring books, being inspired by people who have dreams and achieve them, and just plain loving life.

If you’d told me 10,000 tweets ago that social media would have led me to new friends, supportive mentors, and a new career, I would have asked, “How can 140 characters do that?”

Now I know.

© Ann Tracy Mueller 2012

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So ya wanna be a writer?

You think you want to be a writer?

Join the crowd.

You’ve got stories in your head.

How are others going to hear them if you leave them there?

You’re so busy.

Yep. We all are.

You don’t know where to start.

Start here. Start now

Start with a pen and paper or a computer keyboard. Then get those stories out of your head and onto the page.

Don’t think you have time?

Make time. Get up early or stay up late. Turn off the darned television. Keep a pen and paper with you so you can write when you’re waiting for a train or for a kid to get done with soccer practice or on your lunch hour.

Make writing a priority.

There’s only one way to become a writer – and that’s to write.

Watch for wisdom

In future blog posts, I’ll share words of wisdom from other writers, links to videos that have inspired me or given me direction, tell you about books for, by and about writers. Each and every book or magazine that I have read on writing has given me some morsel that has helped me on my journey.

But above all other things, the one thing that helped me the most was reading. I started early and never quit. As I read, I absorbed sentence structure, grammar and punctuation, phrasing and rhythm.

Read, read, read, read, read

So, if you’re not reading now, or you don’t read often, start. Start today.

• Read newspapers – in print or online.
• Spend the time in a waiting room reading magazines you normally don’t read, not playing Angry Birds on your smartphone.
• Visit your library. You know, that place with all the rows and rows of books.
• Get an ebook reader. You’d be surprised the number of volumes that are available free of charge, and you can download new releases for a fee on the day they hit the market.
• If you’ve got kids or elderly family members in your home or nearby, read to them. It will expose you to things you wouldn’t read otherwise. Sharing their interests will not only broaden your horizon and theirs. It will also expose you to new material, new ideas, new writing styles.

Write often, write lots

But most of all, more than anything, to be a writer, you must write. You must write often. You must write lots.

Ray Bradbury says to write a thousand words a day -- and he practiced what he preached.

Do the same and you’re on the right path.

Don’t put a pen to paper and you’ve got only yourself to blame when ten years from now or twenty or thirty, you’re still saying to yourself, “I wanna be a writer.”

© Ann Tracy Mueller 2012

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