The past.

Well, I’ve spent the past couple of days cleaning out my inbox. Too many emails sit in there that I’ve marked as Unread because eventually I need to come back to them and glean… whatever it was I was supposed to glean from them. Instead, all it has done is grow the unreads in my box to over 2000 (which may shock some and others may be virtually patting me on the head thinking 2000 is such a small number).

In the process, I’ve fallen down a couple of rabbit holes…

You see, I want to be a writer.

Well, let me expand on that. I am a writer, but I want to be more than I currently am. I’m not looking for Steven King level fame and fortune. I just want to have the ability to do the thing I love doing and have it pay for itself (or maybe a little extra).

But, like many things in life, I’m never as dedicated as I would like to be. I believe I have the necessary talent, but I’m not sure I have all the drive I need to have. When I’m good and dedicated to sitting down at the desk and putting words on the page, I can string the days together and before too long I look up and the story is on its way to being written.

But there are the other days, too. The days when I come home from work with all the promise and hope in the world. That night is going to be the one where I knock out 10 pages and then work on a short story as well. I’m going to get so ahead on blog posts that I won’t have to think about any of it until the new year.

Then it is 2 in the morning and past time to go to bed and I’m wondering where the time went. No words magically appeared on the screen. Instead, internet rabbit holes or video games were played to unwind or maybe I started watching the new Alien Earth show… the result is the same: nothing got done.

I feel guilty in that.

However, in cleaning out my emails I have stumbled across older works, unfinished stories, ideas from over ten years ago. I have not read the words in just as long, so to say that I have the freshest eyes I could possibly have for the writing, that’s where I am.

And it is good. This chapter or two of a story which never went anywhere is written pretty well. Sure, I can see some things I would edit, but there are some nice sequences in there that I’m not 100% I actually wrote it.

I say all that not to try to brag about something that was clearly soooo good that I never bothered showing it to anyone else, but I say it more as a reminder to myself. Yes, there are going to be nights where the words don’t flow as easily. There will be days when I am editing those very same words and think “This guy can’t even write”. There will be days that I beat myself up over not having written.

And all of those are very valid.

But there are also going to be those days where pure magic occurs. When the story is so set in my mind that it becomes a bit of a struggle to keep my fingers ahead of my thoughts. The days when editing will feel like someone who knows what they were doing with the prose will shine through. The days where I accomplished more than I had ever thought I could.

Is there a morale to the story? Is it keep trying because eventually you will get there? Is it, you are going to have difficult days and nights, but you must take each of them in the same flow as your characters and just get through the best you can? Or is it that we’re never as bad as we think we are and sometimes we might be as good as we would hope we are?

Yes.