This writer's blog is like my sand pit. I come here to play. I can fill buckets with sand and build castles just to knock them down again. I can dig holes and fall into them. I can push trucks and buckets through the sand and disperse it all around the place. I can fill my pockets with the sand and itch and scratch later when I feel it against my skin later when I am nowhere near the sand pit. That's exactly how I see this blog. A place to play.

In my blog I use the tools I have to play and build and destroy, because it's here for me to grow in, to dig around in. The golden sands are the words. In this sand pit I use the tools of voice and character, slant and opinion, fiction and fantasy, honesty and evasion, prompts and plans just as a child uses buckets and spades and various containers. I like to think of it this way. That way I won't fear to speak whatever comes to me. I can speak freely and let the sand trickle from one container to another, just aimlessly playing to see the way it falls. This is how a writer learns what works. It's in daily play that children develop and learn. It's no different for a writer. I've learnt so much just playing around with words. That's what makes certain prompts or restrictions a good challenge.

I attended a writing workshop once and we had to write a piece and not use the letter e. Do you know how difficult that was? But what fun reading and hearing the stuff we wrote. We laughed and shared our joy in playing with words, just like kids in the sand pit who can only use one bucket and a margarine container to build a castle. I've been to other workshops where we wrote limericks; poetry; alliteration; drew pictures and wrote about what thoughts they inspired; used opening paragraphs from novels to start our own stories; put on hats to get into characters who we wrote about; and many other fun activities. Not all the writing has been outstanding, but it doesn't matter. It's all play, it's all learning, it's all growing and knowing what makes for better dynamic readings.

Dawn asked about what voice we should use in our blogs, is it a conglomeration of all that I've written about before? I feel it is, but not all at once. To conglomerate is to gather together many different particles into one group, usually rock. It's clear we cannot gather all the voices and speak them at once. But we can play with the different voices here in our blogs. We could make one entry in third person point-of-view, just to see how it feels. We could speak the voice of one of our characters, let them have the page for the day. We could try different tones; authoritative, passive, assertive, friendly, humorous, playful, naive or express whatever mood we might feel coursing through our systems and thrumming in our veins as we sit to write.

With the feedback others are so willing to give, we can try out voices, get a response, play with tone and opinion, come at one topic in many different ways, just to see which way we felt click within our writing selves. I like the idea of writing about a situation, perhaps I'll think of a prompt of my own later, but to write about it in different genres. The same characters, situation, and place, but try it out in romance, then fantasy, then murder-mystery, and so on, until we find the one we slip into most easily. The one we enjoyed the most. Because we're just here playing around with words, putting them into different containers and changing their shape. As my son would say, "It's all good." That's all I have time for tonight.