Writing

I haven't been doing very well with keeping a blog.  Sometimes I just get lazy but mostly it's because I'm so easily distracted by other things that I never keep THIS a priority.
I can say one thing lately, I have been writing, just not here.
Just recently, I was pondering over writing and how I was never good at it when it came to test and in English classes.  I had a college professor tell me I wasn't "A" material and no matter what I did I would never make an "A" in her class.  That really builds a person confidence.  I wanted to believe that I could prove her wrong and that maybe she was actually pushing me to prove her wrong, but that never happened.  If I recall I barely made a "B."  I never even told my husband I liked to write because I knew he only knew me as the girl that stunk at English. 
Grammar has always been my weakness and English outside of speeches and class discussions, putting it on paper I just couldn't do it.  However, I have always found myself interested in writing.  When I was in middle school, my Kaleidoscope teacher, Ms. Dunkersly would take me out of class twice a week and take me to the computer lab.  She told me to write.  Write anything.  I would write poems.  Actually I wrote poems all the time.  She liked them and told me to continue to write more.  I was enjoyed reading poetry and lyrics of music.  I see that she saw that in me and told me to write.
In elementary school, I remember one summer I wrote a letter to every kid in my class from the previous year.  Simply because I loved to write.
I went to a Student conference in the eighth grade and was excited to take a journal class, not journalism, but keeping a journal.  I already kept a journal.  The class to this day I remember how she spoke of suggestions of writing to yourself, naming your journal, etc.  I have always tried to keep some type of journal/blog.
In tenth grade, my teacher entered me in a writing contest for the local paper.  She had to fix most grammar, but the context she loved.  I even made an "A" on a summer reading writing exam on a book I had only read the first chapter of, she encouraged me to write.  She also encouraged me to speak publicly.
For five years I wrote a family newsletter to send out to my family.
Overtime I have written hundreds of letters between friends, cards, poems, even a few stories.  I don't know where half of them are, if I even kept them.  Today I keep a fairly regular blog in the place of my journal, but that one English professor damaged me slightly.  I believed I could never be good enough to write.  I let her break my confidence in something I realize I love to do.  I love to write.  Good or not.
Every-now-and-then, a story will come to my mind.  Sometimes a love story.  Things that I would imagine and think about, things that I felt guilty for consuming my mind such as a sweet love story.  For a long time I thought these thoughts, characters in my mind were bad thoughts, because they weren't real and they were temptations in my mind.  That sounds really bad. . .how do I explain.  For example, I would start to think about a guy who wasn't real.  I would give him a name.  I would play out his character in my mind and create a girl for him.  But to even think of another guy, real or not made me feel that I was doing something bad.  Eventually, I started reading again (thank you Hannah) and found these were like stories I was creating myself.  I could do this.
Then recently, this little epiphany came to me, WRITE IT DOWN.  So I did.  It has felt so good to put characters on paper.  Whether they ever get read doesn't matter.  For years I have been creating stories and letting them come and go, because I believed I could never write.  It's fun and realize my thoughts weren't bad;  I wasn't being inappropriate.  I love my husband and I don't have those kind of thoughts.  I just think of my life and girls lives growing up and make stories.  It's fun to put pieces of my experiences and feelings into these characters.  It has been joyful.
I'm not afraid to write anymore and now wish I had written sooner.  I have found that when I write and read it helps me better at writing. 
It makes me happy.
To this day, for my first story that I've actually written down, I have written 90 pages (81/2 x 11 size) turning that to book size becomes 180 pages.  I had a lot to get out of my mind.