I am a what?

I can maim, torture, kill and bury my victims alive if I want to. While driving along the highway I see bodies in the woods because I put them there. I can marry a ninety year old and kiss a tween. I can be the ninety year old and be the tween. I can swim and drown and splash and walk on water. I can live to be a 100 year old virgin and I can be a teenage hooker, kicked out and living on the streets or in a penthouse. Blow up houses, malls, balloons and my mind, I can suffer in the rubble and can rescue the bleeding damaged sorry souls in the rubble too. I can set time bombs, sniff out bombs, decommission mines, plant mines and lose my limbs while doing so.
Giving birth, stealing babies, selling babies, saving babies, that’s what I can do.
I’m a famous unknown, I’m a writer.

I’m like a dog, there’s nothing gross I cannot be and nothing sweeter than a reassuring paw on a quivering hand. I imagine everything and forget it all. I make it up as truthfully as I can. Turn my back on you, stand toe to toe, get in your face, your space, your mind and up your behind, I am a writer.

I can, and will, and won’t and refuse to and beg to do it all and do absolutely nothing because I am a writer. My mind does not work like yours, unless you write.
We are a gang, a group, a line of misfits reaching to the moon and to the center of the earth. We imagine what others don’t even want or care to think about because we are writers.
Think about that?
That’s what we do.
We break rules and make them up.
We are writers who can weasel in and under and crawl beneath your skin all the way up and into your brain. We can break your heart, make you cry, laugh, throw up, sigh and get high because our pages smoke.
We have and will continue to change minds and the world because we are writers. Me, I’m nothing and everything because...
I
am
a
writer.
So, have a nice day today because I can make sure you don’t have a nice one tomorrow, and you know why?
Got that?
Understand?
You do?
You must be a writer too.

Forever and ever

What happens when you run out of time, or actually, when you think you are running out of time?  Once we reach the age called “certain”, (the new 50, which is everything above the half century mark), writers become aware of the longevity of projects, as balanced out by, how much time we have left to complete them.

As an unpublished writer of fiction, do I really want to commit to a year or more, (probably much more), of completing a novel which may never see a shelf other than my own? Non-fiction, that’s another story. Been there, done that, am still doing it.

Though it is said there is no prejudice against older writers in traditional publishing, we all know that is not true. Agents and publishers look at writers, and the many years of writing ahead for them, to earn out advances and cash in on the efforts of everyone. In my mind, if all things are equal but age, it is likely youth will win out?

This whole age vs. time analysis has become an issue for me. But when I mull the importance of age considerance I realize we are all of a certain age. None of us is guaranteed the next few decades, few years, day or hours. Life is tenuous.  

The limits we put on our achievements and successes are only bound by the efforts we put forth to complete them.  Whatever our passion, if we don’t try, don’t finish and simply dream, wonder and wait, we self-prophesize ourselves to fail.

I breathe, therefore life is endless and achievement possible.

Naked and not afraid

When you have lived somewhere long enough, worked at a job forever, when dreams end in etc., when waiting becomes endless, when change becomes impossible, when tomorrow is your only winning lottery ticket, where do you go, how do you quit, find reality, leave instead of stay and  how do you flip a coin in an empty hand?

I live in a hamster wheel which has a governor on it to slow its momentum, around and around in the same track where time and tasks are deadening.

I want change and yet I dread it.

So I pulled my empty pocket inside out and wrote.

It is a very revealing and serious essay, my words, which I sent to the big guys. No humor, no tricks, no funny stuff to connect me to the general lives of the reader I seek to discover every time I write. Only introspection and examination of that which has always been an uncomfortable revisit to a small part of my childhood which, for a while, took the lead in my personal play.

It was with reservations, I sent the essay out, because it was so blatantly honest and personal. I sizzled with anticipation because I knew it was newsworthy, my slant a bit different and exactly what they wanted. Or was it?

Part of me was proud of my honesty and part of me was terrified. It left me mentally and emotionally naked. If it ran I had no place to hide and nothing with which to cover myself. I was convinced I was ready. But was I?

Terrified of acceptance and heartbroken by rejection, my wheel slowed, my world paused. “What if,” became my license plate.

My answer?

All but one editor responded.

“The piece is powerful.”

“Very well written.”

“Timely.”

“Great writing.”

“Authentic.”

Words I have sought for thirty years. Words a writer like me dreams about, pines for, begs for, strips naked for. They saw me, and turned away, but they looked and liked my skin. I had done well. It was rejection without shame.

I washed myself in relief, concealed myself in denial, slept well and moved on.

In a world of writer’s self-deception I thanked the essayist in me for being so honest.

 

When was the last time you were so honest you feared acceptance?