"Chaco sketches" by Judith Nasse

I have written in many places, Italy, Spain, France, and Greece. Before I was a writer, I jotted itineraries and restaurant notes in my day planner. In London, where I lived for twelve years, I prepped myself for my future unknown writing career by pushing the babies’ pram down to the John Keats library where I voraciously devoured as many books as I had tried cuisine on the continent BC (Before Children).

I moved back to Berkeley, to the San Francisco Bay Area, and that’s where I was encouraged to write by a kindly professor. I then read Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way twelve times over until I finally believed I could probably be an artist/writer. I wrote morning pages like a devotee, and haven’t stopped since. They are my passage into my creativity each day.

About that same time I started my first two novels. One still sits on the shelf waiting to know whether its fate is to be “the cutting my teeth on a writing book” or will be coaxed into a full-fledged novel some year. The second book is on the desk of its first editor. Will it be like my daughter’s first nursery school that she firmly rejected until we found the right fit, or will this be its publishing home?

I moved to Taos eleven years ago where my writing was inspired by the creativity raging here. The outside influence gradually became a part of my muscles and bones, the very marrow of my life as I slowly learned how to make creativity a daily discipline. That daily discipline or practice may be the hardest part of learning to write. It is an internal necessity now such that if deprived for more than a day or two I become bonkers.

From Taos I have made trips, road trips, plane trips, camping trips, and day trips, writing on each trip, even writing in uncomfortable places like the blazing sun studded with buzzing flies in Chaco Canyon. It was worth it. What a stunning place. Now, I’m ready for a new place, most likely northern California, making full circle to where I originated.

I worry that I won’t be able to write as much in the transition time between selling my house and settling into the new location; and maybe I won’t be able to with all the busyness, stress, and chores of moving along with continuing my day job until I leave.

I do know, however, that I will write my morning pages. Research books, index cards, notebooks, and pens will be visibly by my side each day, along with my sketch pad and camera to illustrate moments like a magpie or blue jay strutting across the yard.

Most of all I’ll have my laptop to keep in touch with the Book Writing World as my BWW group is my anchor in all my creative storms. Best of all, when in California, I’ll be closer to the cadre of BWW friends who live there!

Judith Nasse is a founding member of the Book Writing World, a historical novelist, artist, and currently living in Taos, New Mexico.