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They say writing is lonely. It isn't. Characters talk to you all the time. You travel in their heads – go where they go, see what they see, feel what they feel.
You're a voyeur, a confidant and a stool-pigeon, yet no matter how you treat them they always come back to visit.
What gets weird is when you're living their life and not your own. Sometimes I see the world only through their eyes. Everything has an ulterior motive – to end up as part of their story.
You're alone in that you are the only being in the room taking up space and excreting CO2, but you're holed up in a tree fort with all these imaginary playmates. Real people can be an interruption to fine threads you've cast out to reel back with great care so you can wind them round and round to lace a tale.
At 37 I decided I wanted to write a mystery novel. Now, thirty years later, I have finished it. So, you're perhaps wondering – what happened in the meantime. Mostly raising a family. Moved a lot. Moving creates chaos. After my last move in 2011 I decided to take the dozen file boxes stuffed with research and rough drafts for my mystery series and stick them in the garage until mold darkened the pages, and I could trash them with a clear conscience.
A year ago I picked up a flyer at the Grove Street Brewery in Shelton, Washington. The Timberland Library offered ten slots in a one-time seminar for anyone interested in writing. I was number ten. Ten strangers bonded through words of wounds and wishes and decided to make that magic happen again. We still meet twice a month. We became, FIRST DRAFT 98584.
Last September, 2012 I re-opened my file boxes and back-up hard drive to my languishing story, Dead Rite. I felt like an orphan reunited with a lost sibling.
Morale of the story – don't give up your dreams.
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