Don't Stop Me Now

My fingers are getting that itchy feeling. That sudden desire to claw at the keys to get words to escape in fours, fives, and hundreds onto a screen. I'm feeling that familiar pull to write. To just write and write and write. Finally after a few weeks, I've found a moment to do a little something about it. I certainly hope I don't have to wait much longer to do more.

My workload is increasing: at the office, at home, all of it. But with it comes this slow and steady build towards something. Toward what will be in four months, the next chapter outlining the beginning of the next adventure in my life, in my family's life. I am anxious to open it and begin writing. But as all good things, it cannot be sooner. Not yet.

In the meantime, let us prepare. Let us work, let me schedule my new classes, find our new home, and mostly, let me write. And write and write and write. Because if there is one thing I have learned in my life, it is that one can write wherever you are and whatever your circumstances, so long as you have the desire.

Pens and computers are merely a vessel. Your mind holds the meat of the story, the entire timeline, the characters, the setting, the plot and theme. All you need is that itch. That drive to create.

If you haven't done it, it is like learning an instrument or how to play a sport. You start with the basics, just the structure and the parts, then slowly, slowly, then faster as you progress, you create. If something doesn't work, cut the part that isn't working. Don't burn down the house because you don't like how the plumbing went in or how the bathroom looks. Just tear that part out and keep going. It can be done.

As for the rest of the day-to-day life, my highlights are reading nightly with my daughter. If you do not have that pleasure, I can promise there is no feeling as wonderful as reading a loved story alongside your child as they discover it for the first time. The laughter, the tears, their incredulity at the characters, or their confessions of love for other characters makes my heart full.

And then I think of my own creations. And how if I don't get them out, my children will never know them. Other children will never come to know them. Would that be a great tragedy? To not have my mind's precious stories shared? My husband assures me so. But the truth is, if I never share, the ones who may come to love them never get their chance to weigh in. Is that so fair?

So write for them, write for yourself. Write for the love of writing. Just write. And write and write and write some more. And eventually, something will come out of your mind that will make a difference.

Rewriting the Stars

This last month, it was 5 years since I started my current full time job. I have grown gracefully and a little wildly in places. And I have learned much. In all the things I have accomplished and set before me, I have sowed a seed that grew to reveal a very different plant than I thought I was going to get.

I thought that I was going to just work a normal 9-5 job, raise a family, and write in all the spaces in between. Instead, I have learned that for myself, that is not to be. Rather than filing and managing and working those numbers, I am a different plant than one that thrives in such an environment.

Despite loving who I work for, those I work alongside, and the meaning behind all of the work, I am finding that I am not happy there. I have tried being happy, and I feel I was, for a time. Now, however, I feel it is time to move on and do that which I have always desired to do.

It is time to leave the world we have created: the 9-5, the rush hour traffic, the Mondays, the "hump" days, and the office burnout. It is time to go back to what started all of this blogging and writing nonsense.

Stories. Books. Settings. Characters. Themes. Connection. Hope. My life.

And ironically enough, it begins with relearning the alphabet, words, sentence structure, and wordplay. In every sense, I am about to embark on getting those obnoxious ABC's down to no longer a science, but an art. It is time to go back to school. To study what I've always loved and had a passion for. To work to accomplish what I feel I've always been meant to do.

And so I go. Literally, I will go to school. To finish what I began years back; to set out on the next adventure of my life and of my family's. In this moment, it brings me peace to say such things.

Books Keep Us Free

There are quite a few books that I have had the pleasure of reading that have brought me a new depth and perception to my life that I never could have thought possible.  There are numberless books that have changed me.  There are so many many books that have caused me to lose hours and hours of much needed sleep, while I either read them, or relived them in my head.  There are only a few that have changed me, given me a new depth, and caused me to lose sleep not because I wanted to, but because I was haunted by them.

Hiroshima by John Hersey was a book that left images in my mind and heart that haunted me for a week afterward.  When I think of that novel, I feel the breath leaving my body, as if my lungs no longer work.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.  The difference of this novel is that it is a work of pure fiction.  So I was able to eventually crawl out of the abyss this one threw me into.  However, what happens to the main character in this novel is an occurrence that happens much too often when it should never even be a whiff of imagination.  Young girls preyed upon, obsessed by, kidnapped, raped, murdered and the people who get away with it.  It is nothing one should ever have to know about, much less experience.  And the families left behind, torn apart by the not knowing and the evil that such a mark can leave on the world.  This work left me aching for those who have been through this, whether or not they survived.  It left me aching for families that were shattered by these things, and made me, as a mother, a basket case for quite some time.

The book I just completed yesterday is in the same mold.  The Librarian of Auschwitz by Antonio Iturbe. You can hear all the horrors and the heroic events of such a time, but it never prepares you for when it impresses itself upon you like a vice.  The images and the events spin around in my head like a whirlwind.  To imagine those who lived through it and had to carry on such horrifying nightmares from which most of their family never survived... there are no words that can comprehend it.  But there are words that can try.  This one mixes fiction with nonfiction, but to be honest, you knew when you were reading fiction and when you simply were not.

I couldn't even rate it on good reads because I could never say whether it was a good thing to have read it or not. I could never say I recommend it.  I could never say, "Read this, you'll love it." Because it terrified me. While immersed in its pages, reality felt like a dream that was too good.  I could barely comprehend the polar opposite that it was. Even now, I am left with these pieces of myself that I have to figure out how to reassemble.  And I know that when I am done, the picture will not be quite the same.

Each of these books has left a mark that will not come off.  I respect them for that, I thank them for that.  But I will never read any of these three books again.  I cannot experience them again.

I think of what I will write, and I think of why, and I know.  These books, this last one in particular, remind me of that.