Squirrel!

I need to remind myself that writing consistently doesn’t require the subject matter to be an existential threat or some dire social crisis. Sometimes, it can be about squirrels.

Yes, squirrels. Those cute little buggers who eat pine cones and make cute little chittering noises when they’re angry. The fuzzy, fluffy-tailed braggarts who will, in fact, bite your finger if you don’t have anything edible to feed them (at least at MacKerricher State Park, in Fort Bragg, California, they do).

Sometimes the point of writing consistently is simply to consistently write, regardless of the subject. I should know that. I used to be a reporter for a community newspaper for two-and-a-half years. I wrote about everything, every week, related to Mendocino, California, and the unincorporated areas of the Mendocino Coast. I guess in the years since I left, I got into a trap of thinking I needed to write about something important, when all I needed to write about was what was outside my front door.

Which brings me back to squirrels. Because I got distracted.

Writing is an exercise. The more you do it, the better you get. Your mind, your brain, is a muscle that needs to be worked in order for it to work properly. Writing is hard when you start, just like anything else, because of the weight of your own inertia. When you exercise it regularly, the difficulty becomes less the process of writing and more about the nuance of what you have to say that becomes the struggle. I know I get wrapped up in my own thinking and caught up in perfectionism of expression.

Then I remember what Stephen King wrote about first drafts. To paraphrase, I just gotta get the words on the paper (or screen, depending on how you work).

And then along comes a squirrel.