On Writing: A Salon at the Inn

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure,
only death can stop it. 
​Ernest Hemingway

The Presidential Lounge at the Mission Inn

 Sometimes I come to my laptop, sit down, and don't have a clue as to what I want to write.  The other day I was feeling inspired...it was yesterday in fact.  I had been to an amazing writing salon with a young MFA graduate from UCR with whom I had taken a memoir writing class early in the spring.  She is moving back east, but wanted to offer some summer salons for her students before she left.  I was very excited.  Just that morning, I had written a long list of blog topics I could write about...maybe even turn into personal essays for, are you sitting, publication.

For some reason I cannot recall now, I had to miss the first salon, so I was totally jazzed about attending this one.  I rearranged some plans to go to a concert and even wrote something to be critiqued.  As the appointed time grew near, it was not certain we would even meet.  Only two of the students from the workshop were able to come.  But Minda, (Minda Honey), decided we would go forward. We decided to meet at the Mission Inn's Presidential Lounge, just the three of us.  And so there we were, the three of us, two of us with Margaritas and one with white wine.  

Without going into too much detail. I have to say it was one of those experiences when I felt like, well, a writer.  We talked content and message, word choice and tone, pace and flow.  We sipped our drinks over the two hours and I felt like somewhere nearby Hemingway, Lawrence, Eliot and Fitzgerald might have been watching.  Well,  it my fantasies, this is what I always thought would be a part of my life as a writer.

Well, its not the Left Bank of Paris and I'm probably never gonna be a Hemingway.  Not sure I want to be, at least as far as his lifestyle is concerned.  I do want to write, though.  And it is happening.  I am a writer.  Even when I am not writing, I am thinking about it.  That is one of the true signs of being a writer.  I am finding my own voice, in fact, I think I have found it pretty much.  I imagine someone might even guess it was a piece I wrote even if my name isn't attached.  Well, it could happen...

Anyway, that is where I am at.  I am writing a blog about it. And that's what writers do.  They write.
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