Johnny Depp, eat your heart out.

I realize that my blog has, for the most part, not been terribly substantive lately. I'm sorry about that, but as has happened in the past, something's had to give, and recently my online presence is what had to go. I'm putting up a short story every month on my new fiction-only blog (have you checked out the extra audio post yet?), so I'm still trying to put my writing out there, but my ability to just chat online is limited, especially with our family's summer schedule...

But I still wanted to share with you just a little of what I've been doing at home with The Serious Girl and my husband:

LEGO pirate ship. You know you love it.

The writer is the one who stays in the room.

Photo by Javiy, found here.

With apologies for the appalling delay, here is my summary of my favorite lesson from the keynote speech by Ron Carlson at this year's Muse and The Marketplace writers' conference:

The writer is the one who stays in the room.

We are not writing to support our beliefs, we are writing to discover what might be worth believing in.

Writing is like walking out into the ocean. At some point, the waves will lift you up, and you won't be able to touch the ground. And it won't matter if the ground is six inches below you, or six feet below you, or sixty feet below. When you can't touch, you can't touch.

And there will be friends waiting for you on the shore, on the warm sand with towels to dry you off, and they will console you if you swim back to them, they'll say, "it's okay, we understand, you can try again to write tomorrow."

But it's your job to stay there, to deal with the ambiguity and uncertainty and fear.

Keep swimming.

The writer is the one who stays in the room.