To focus or not to focus?

Make your vision blurry.

What appears to be nothing is really something if you stop focusing so much.

While I was on my trip, I noticed something strange. As I was doing other things on this trip like keeping my heart from crashing through my chest from my own paranoia of a bear sneaking up on me while I was on the latrine, little side thoughts from the corner of my brain would get through.

Thoughts of high class hookers and rodeo riders. A man unable to stop himself from reading his fiances journal because it's sitting there on the table taunting him while he eats breakfast.

But I couldn't quite pay attention to these thoughts because I was more preoccupied with my terror for this bear that didn't exist. The thoughts and visions just kept flooding my skull.

What I realized was my muse really likes to fuck with me and likes to play while I'm not paying attention because as soon as I started to focus on these ideas that were coming, they stopped.

It's like one of those illusion pictures that you can't look directly at because you won't see the picture that is hidden in there. You have to almost cross your eyes and NOT FOCUS on the picture in order to see the picture. But once you've seen it, you can't not see it. It's there. It's clear. But you had to ignore it for it to come to you.

I guess it all kind of makes sense now. I remember before I made the decision to write, ideas were abundant. They came all the time. I saw possibility in everything I encountered. Movies, music, books, nature, conversations with people, ear hustling on other people's conversations in the Starbuck's, people watching, all of it.  I had ideas and stories. I could lay awake at night for hours playing out an entire novel in my head that I made up as I went along. This wasn't my intention, it would just happen.

Now that my intention is to write, it seems impossible to even come up with an idea for a blog post. So I will try this new method and ignore my muse. 

But I have to tell you, a strange thing happened the other day. I had jotted down the ideas that came to me while we were out in the wilderness.

Shay's best friend is a high class hooker, but she's also a professional rodeo rider. Crazy, I know. I have been racking my brain trying to figure out where I could find a rodeo show around here to watch.

Well, the family and I were going to a frisbee golf course to play and we turned the wrong way. We drove for a long time. I was looking at all the cool houses and subdivision signs because sometimes they're funny and inspire ideas. Out of nowhere there was this big white sign that said, Championship Rodeo. It gave the place, the dates and a phone number to call for more info. I couldn't believe it! We turned around so I could write the info down and then went back the right way to our frisbee golf course.

My luck is changing, I thought. And I've been writing and putting notes together since.

I lost the fisbee golf game by the way. I totally suck at throwing one of those damn disks, but we had fun.

And one more thing, just to hold myself accountable, I was thinking about doing a Random Topic Tuesday, where I pick a random topic and give all the information I found on it. I figure it might help with ideas for writing, character traits, scenes, places, etc...

What do you think about that? I could use some feedback. Honest feedback. And maybe some ideas for random topics that you'd like to see.

Until next time
~Live Happy