Birthday
A nice birthday. Good gifts. Good food. Good company.

Writing
One of the nicer gifts (not the nicest) was a book Carla gave me. I told her I wanted a book on how to improve your writing. I like to write and I am trying to write a roleplaying game book, but sometimes I go to write my ideas and thoughts down and my mind goes blank. Carla bought me a book called Writing Down the Bones. It takes a Buddhist perspective on writing and it talks about things like approaching writing with a beginner's mind and writing as a form of meditation. One of the things it suggests is something I have heard before, but never had explained the exact reason that a person should try it. It suggests writing just to write and not worrying about quality. Doing this helps the words flow better. Take a notebook and fill up X number of pages or decide on a certain amount of time that you will write and keep writing. Since you are just writing and it's not something you are likely to share, you don't have to go back and edit. You can just write.

I was going to do something similiar when I started this blog. I wanted to log in and just blog about anything. Not really worry about it. Just blog. Somewhere along the lines I started worrying about what I was saying. I knew friends would be reading this and I wanted to make sure it sounded OK. "Is this too personal? Do I sound silly? Are those the best words I could use?" Whenever I start thinking like that, I usually don't end up bloggin'.