100 days of writing about writing is quite taxing.
The finished project ought to represent the raw material for a book on writing. If that is the case then tonight’s foray into the writerverse borrows from Stephen King’s On Writing in which he waxes philosophically (and quite practically) about his history as a writer and allows we the readers to figure out what applies to us. King is a bad mamajama.
I’m not quite so bad as the man himself. I’m just a guy who used to be a latch key kid who entertained himself by playing with baseball cards and small balled up piece of paper and imagining it was a real game of baseball as the cards were splayed out around me in all of the positions on the field. Imagining was my escape from the world. Sure, I had an Atari for a while, but when my dad died that device managed to disappear along with fishing boat he left me. My mother’s bank account matriculated during that time. Even then I recognized the connection, but I was young and powerless and, besides, there was a lot of joy to be had in a big living room where nine cards were splayed out and a second pile of cards waited to step up to home plate and knock that wadded up bit of napkin over the couch and out of the ballpark.
I started writing because the stories couldn’t fit in that space. I wrote to get them out of my head. I wrote to show them to people and to make people smile. Except nobody really smiled or even cared that I wrote. After a while I stopped sharing and kept the words tucked away behind the stacks of books in my short bookshelf. They were mine, and they were safe with me because they couldn’t be ridiculed or ignored.
Writing is probably the most vulnerable thing I’ve ever done. It doesn’t get easier over time. I just have become quite adept at hiding the things I don’t want people to ridicule. I write it in my head where nobody else can get to it. The problem is that is probably my best stuff.