Bah. I spent this afternoon online, first hunting for possible houses (endless, endless listings of houses that are either too expensive or else in areas we just don't want to live in) and then for possible airplane tickets to America (ditto, ditto, basically, although not quite so dire a situation). Sigh. I gave up after an hour and a half, feeling very disheartened, to go cuddle on the couch with Maya.

(This doesn't, btw, mean that I'm giving up on either attempt - in fact, I'm determined to buy our airplane tickets within the next week. I just decided to give up for the day and go back to it again this weekend when Patrick will be home to do the search with me.)

It's hard to get into a writing mood after an afternoon like that. Luckily, when I opened up my "Writing" folder tonight, I came across a file I'd made a couple of years ago and then forgotten about. It's called "Reminders", and it's full of quotes I found that always helped me with writing, along with personal notes that I'd saved to re-read on bad days. They used to be saved individually as notecards that popped up on my desktop, two laptops ago. When I switched laptops and operating systems, I saved the whole bunch as a single MS Word file, and promptly forgot about it until tonight.

Here are the writing quotes I saved two years ago that still make me happy and remind me about what writing's all about:

"Adventures don't begin until you get into the forest. That first step is an act of faith."
-Mickey Hart

"Take the attitude that what you are thinking and feeling is valuable stuff, and then be naive enough to get it all down on paper." -Anne Lamott

"Guilty pleasure is what writing is all about."
-Julia Cameron

“A great book is about the most important moment in a character’s life.”
-Jennifer Crusie

“Follow your weird.”
-Clive Barker

On to the writing!