Fiction has always been my invisible friend. I was an only child who was deeply shy, brutally pale, and particularly awkward. I had a few restless friends, but I spent a lot of time quietly entertaining myself while shadowing my mom as she cleaned houses or took care of old people. My mom would take me to the library weekly so I could harvest another stack of books. I was always sad to return my temporary friends, though, which is why I think I love owning books and that permanence instead of borrowing.
As a freshman in college, I fell in love, like you do, in a storybook and fictional kind of way. He was a bit older, a year from graduating, and we would stay up late every night, hanging out in the basement of the boys dorm — because boys were not allowed in the girls dorm — and work on homework and studying. We were both night owls, and he helped me with my Fortran and read through my English papers. He decided we should take a creative writing class together that next semester. Perhaps it was the play I wrote and turned in for my 101 final exam instead of a persuasive essay… Thankfully, my instructor was a poet in the grad program, so I still ended up with an A in that class. That next semester in the Introduction to Creative Writing class, I stretched my writing beyond what I thought it could be, and I truly started to understand the beauty of telling stories and writing unexpected phrases. Both my boyfriend and my teacher handed me books that expanded my dreams in the best directions. As usually happens, graduation meant needing a job that would pay the bills, and the poetry and late-night fiction sessions fell away to deadlines for the magazine I was working for. I spent all day copy editing and double checking phone numbers and websites, and my brain simply couldn’t handle anymore word tasks during evening hours. Randomly, I could sit down on a Saturday night and tap out a few words, but I neglected my fiction friend and pretended to be an adult for a while. Years later, the love disintegrated, and I made the perilous decision to move to New Jersey on a whim and by myself. Alone, again with few friends, I wrote. Some fiction. Some poetry. Some blog posts. When I found a publishing job in New York City, working with an educational company that published books through Random House, I of course dreamed of being able to hand over some literary magic and have it hit the streets, but the only work of mine that made it into bookstores was educational books, and again my brain was too tired of page proofs and discussions of automated content management systems to produce fiction. A quick kerfuffle with a healthcare issue made it necessary to transition out of corporate and hop into an entrepreneurial adventure with my boyfriend (now my husband) who had been tutoring students individually for years. Because students are in school during the day, he got to sleep late in the mornings, and I was jealous of that. I decided that the emptiness of my mornings could be used helping others self-publish. Before I knew it, I had more authors needing my help than I could handle, and my own writing still sat sadly abandoned. Last year, I stopped taking on other people’s projects and decided to focus on my own. I had so many ideas and no time to nourish them. Every year, about this season, I get the creative writing bug, and so I have managed to carry through with a (mostly) daily habit of writing for the past year — sometimes poetic, sometimes garbage-ic. Perhaps it's the heat, but random moments will awaken that Southern mode I find myself in lately. I think of crock pot recipes and of pouring buckets of soapy water on roses to keep away the bugs for my mom after she was done mopping floors or scrubbing something for someone else, something she probably learned from watching her grandmother heave water into the yard. These are the images that fill my daily writing journal. My daily journaling routine has really solidified my own technique really resonates with something within me. I learned of that method from a book years ago and have adapted it by adding components of randomness. I try to simply capture something that we all mostly tend to describe as "unexplainable" — the complexity of the human experience. I’m sure as I work toward further developing my own projects, I’ll need to be able to face some hard moments from my past and write about them with all of the simplicity I can muster. But I guess that's perhaps why we turn it into fiction, right? So, just like any relationship: It'll be a daily commitment to work at it and appreciate every moment of the entire experience.
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