I was going to write today, but I ended up cleaning my writing space…

lizshine74by lizshine74

In A Room Of Your Own.

Writing Room

Everything I tossed out symbolized every minute of my time I’ve given away for the cause of being good, loved, and successful. I’ve spent the last six days in a storm of emotion, and though not a lot is clear to me, one thing is: time to honor and protect my creative time. Time to be less in areas that bring me less joy or are less aligned with my core values. I tossed out everything I had piled on my desk that wasn’t a tool in my creation. I moved my guitar and practice stand to a more inspiring space. I put up purple string lights and unburied my typewriter from the piles of shit I’d heaped around it. I had planned to write this weekend, but instead, I wound up clearing the way for writing this week and next.

Three months ago I decided to take myself more seriously as a poet and started going through my entire poetry archives to find any poems worth working on. I’ve been chipping away at this project for all that time. This weekend, I buckled down, set a timer, and cleared the entire archives. I am ready to start polishing up poems to send out. I am ready to start making time every day and tuning out the noise.

To even get through the work day last Wednesday, I put my nose in the 50th anniversary edition of Diane Di Prima’s Revolutionary letters. That turned out to be just the balm I needed, just the nudge toward forward movement. If you haven’t read it, you should binge it as soon as you can.

Stay tuned, I am working on a tune-up of my last year’s new year writing plan. It’s tentatively titled: Rebel Writing Plan 2025. Just like last year, it will be free and posted here.

I also work as a writing coach and love helping writers gain confidence, set goals, and develop their work. For more information on coaching, email me at eatyourwords.lizshine@gmail.com.

lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.