Earlier this year I bookmarked a great guest post on The Urban Muse with the title Reignite Your Passion For Words. At the time, my passion for words and writing as a little below par, but the ideas in the post still seemed to ring true.

Now that my writing fingers seem to be flying over the keyboard a bit more regularly, this post is even more useful. And in fact I’ve been unwittingly following most of the strategies mentioned anyway, including:

• Read more: Lately I’ve been absolutely swallowing books whole. Partly it’s a summer thing – all these daylight hours seem to give me enough energy to read later into the evening, and make me want to sit around outside in the beautiful weather reading during the day. And it’s definitely true for me that reading makes me want to write – either to try to write as well as the author I’ve been reading, or if it’s not a great book, because I think I can write even better.
• Watch TV or DVDs: I’m usually not a huge fan of watching too much TV, but much to my surprise I’ve recently got hooked on watching The West Wing on DVD – I was living abroad when it first screened here, but now that I’m catching up, I find it really well-written and with interesting plots, and some interesting and wide-ranging ideas.
• Exercise: or in the original post, Shovel the Driveway (not too useful in a non-snowy country like mine!) – okay, I haven’t used this strategy too much recently. But I agree that it helps inspire you to write – it gives you mental energy and time and space to come up with great ideas.
• Begin a new project: Well, funny you should say that. The ABNA 2010 contest was recently – ABNA is the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award where last year my novel, Kanako’s Foreigner, made it to the semi-finals – with a submission date of January 25, 2010. Wow, that’s a lot sooner than I expected. But seeing the announcement has definitely got me fired up to, well, not exactly begin a new project, but get back to an old one – I want to try to finish off my “Bratislava novel” (which doesn’t have a cool working title yet, but does have quite a few chapters written) in time for this contest. Go me!
• Write just for you: Hey, I’ve even been doing this – writing semi-journal entries more often that I don’t expect anyone else to ever read.

So, now that I’m hoping my writing career is a little more on track again, and I’m feeling inspired, then I’m off to try and get some semblance of order into my plot ideas for my Bratislava story, and to get back into some serious writing. January 25 is not much more than a month away. Eeek!!