Hello My Writing Warriors!

I’m currently writing this from the guest bedroom at my Mom and Step Dad’s house in Stuart’s Draft, Virginia.

I grew up in the Shenandoah Valley in the town of Staunton. This is my childhood home, and I dearly love coming back to Virginia for the Holidays.

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Christmas was my favorite holiday as a kid, and although the Yuletide Season has worn on me a little as an adult (who doesn’t get frazzled by the non stop shopping madness and consumer orgy that Christmas as devolved into) I still love the holiday season, the magic of Christmas Eve and the reverence of Christmas Day.

I’m glad to be on vacation. I’m glad that this turbulent difficult year of 2017 is coming to a close. I will be honest with you, my writing warriors, much of 2017 sucked a fat knob for yours truly. I had some highlights, there were some good moments, some islands of happiness and achievement, but I didn’t clear the bar on many of my goals. I will do a formal Goal Breakdown and Review of 2017 in an upcoming JFW!, but for right now, I will just say that I’m glad that 2017 is going bye bye.

What I realized as I was on my flight from  Orlando to Richmond, apart from the fact that I’m running out of money (that’s another blog post that I will get to some where down the line), but since this is JFW!,  I wanted to give you guys some sage medicine about writing and how travel is so important for us not just as writers but human beings.

In the last few days as I was making preparations for my vacation, it came to my attention that I haven’t been out of the state of Florida in almost three years. Other than a December 2015 trip to Miami Beach to see my Mom and sisters Vanessa and Victoria, I’ve been land locked in Florida since February of 2015. This lack of travel definitely caused a lot of my depression that I so frequently do battle with and it carried over into my work as a writer, entrepreneur, and student.

We live in such an amazing time, my writing warriors, a time when travel is available to all. The richness of the world, the great banquet of other countries, other lands, other peoples, this is available to us for the first time in recorded history.

I’ve said it before, and I will say it again until I’m blue like the great lord Shiva in the face (because repetition is the mother skill of mastery)that 90% of this writing game is half mental, and we have to always be on our brain game if we are to rock the page and leave our mark. Put simply, travel is a powerful tonic for the mind, a potent anti-oxidant that combats the spiritual malaise that sets in like a creeping fog from our 9-5 Industrial Era Corporate Life that has set everything to a time sheet and a clock on the wall.

If your writing is going no where. If you are suffering a dry spell of the soul and it’s bleeding over onto the page. If your work sucks and the weekly Artist Date ain’t cutting it then sometimes you have to do something drastic and that is when the tonic of travel will come through for you in a big way.

I’ve only been out of Florida for a day and a half but already I can feel my strength returning. It’s like there was a wound on my soul for so long and it is finally lifting, and I can see the sun emerging through the clouds. I know it sounds cheesy, but hey, a little cheese in moderation never hurt anyone.

So in closing my writing warriors, I leave you with this. If you are stuck. If you are washed up. If you feel like the writing KGB is on its way to your house to snatch your laptop so that you don’t inflict anymore crap on the world then its time to travel.

Until Next Time my Writing Warriors!

TC

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