Writing is my life.
There, I said it. This has always been the truth of the matter, but over the last two weeks I have been extremely limited in my capacity to write and that taught me a lesson about the value of writing. In short, life without creation is crap. There is a hole that is there when I am not writing that I believe makes me a darker person. I ended up playing a few hours of minecraft and watching tv shows as a way to fill that void, but it didn’t. Instead I just dealt with it the way I deal with all things: cross-addiction. Find the feeling in another way.
But it isn’t the same feeling. Often I don’t know if I have one true story to tell, but I do know that it matters to me to tell stories and to shape narratives around dynamic characters who, often, are reflections of the people in my sphere. It is a catharsis to come to the page and unload these things. It fills me with a sense of wonder to imagine that someone somewhere might actually read a thing I wrote and smile for a minute or at least feel for a minute–even if they hate it they felt something at that is what matters.
As I sit here at my ever-evolving work station griping my shoulder in the hopes that the pressure will ease the pain, I find myself hopeful and wishing for a time where the words will flow more naturally and more often and that slow trickle of production will give way to what I intend: a lifestyle.
What would that look like? Well, I wake up and take a walk (hopefully with my partner, ,but it is early so…) then we sit and have coffee and talk about our day and our lives. Then I go to the workstation and I grind out the words for a few hours (many writers suggest 4 hours at first sit, but I like 2) and then we move into the other aspects of our day for a while before I return to the page for another burst of the fiction.
After long over forty years I’ve only figured out what the first half of a magical day would look like. I’ve also discovered that this day is built so that it can take place anywhere–any city, any shore, any orbit should that one day become an option (at this point it would take Alien intervention, which I do not expect in the next 1000 years and when they do come they will likely appear in the form of signals and software first–things that can be transmitted by wave and understood once we discover a universal programming language which shouldn’t be a terribly strange concept, but somehow always is).
What is next for me is to sit with my mate and discover what the rest of that day looks like. It is to be our grand adventure.