*deep breath*
So, here's the thing.
I used to write like breathing. Like something that both felt utterly natural and utterly necessary to survival.
I announced as a precocious seven year old, when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, that I wanted to be a world-famous author "like Roald Dahl".
(There's an entire digression into how poorly his work has aged and the debatability of his fame, and that's not even touching on the mess that is the current sanitisation of his works and both the erasure of authorial intent and control AND the blatant money-grab by the publishers, not to mention the tone-deafness of the edits AND the fact that an old dead white dude's stuff is getting rehashed instead of highlighting new authors and stories... but that's not what this post is about.)
(This post might be full of similar run-on sentences; I'd apologise, but it'd be an empty gesture given that I'm pretty sure it'll happen again, and saying sorry is meant to mean that you're not going to commit the same act again, and, well... *gestures at this entire parenthetical* we can see how likely that is.)
So yes. At one point, and for a significant portion of my childhood and teen years, I fully intended to make good on that pronouncement. Moreover, I thought it would be easy to do so.
Writing certainly felt easy, and was something I both loved doing and felt compelled to do.
And then it was not.
I've told friends and friendly colleagues who've asked in the past why I stopped, that I am afraid, and could trace that fear back to a single class in university.
It's glib, but not entirely untrue.
It was a Creative Writing class, and we had a guest lecturer - a professional editor from the traditional publishing industry, talking about the realities of said industry and day-to-day work for editors like them.
It was insightful and illuminating, and some of the class left the lecture invigorated and excited to overcome the obstacles to becoming a successfully published author.
But I remember feeling my dreams shrivel and wither, as though they were delicate mosses blasted by sudden heat or sunlight.
Because I was suddenly confronted with the reality that my dream wouldn't be easy and might never come true - and that I would be just one of hundreds of others like me, lost in a crowd, not special or notable.
I had been a big fish in a little pond for so long, writing as easily as breathing, stories bubbling up inside and exciting me as I spilled them out onto the page.
And suddenly I knew that I was no longer that big fish. Suddenly, I knew I would likely face countless rounds of rejection and indifference, even ridicule, for the stories I wanted to tell.
I didn't have sufficient self-esteem or confidence to withstand the imagined scorn. In the span of just 40 minutes, I imagined everything that might be said of my writing, assumed it all to be true and warranted... And just like that, I no longer found writing as easy as breathing, and in fact was struggling to breathe as well.
(All this was probably exacerbated by undiagnosed autism and accompanying rejection sensitivity dysphoria, but since I'm still undiagnosed I can only offer that to my past self as hypothesis rather than known fact.)
I've tried, at various times, to recapture the old joy and excitement of storytelling. TTRPGs have helped - one glorious hybrid LARP with a heavy (and unplanned by the poor STs) online RP component certainly did the most to reignite the passion to write. Between myself and one friend, we wrote over 20,000 words back and forth in the span of 48 hours, which I then took and turned into over 30,000 words of fleshed out description and narrative that still holds up after 5+ years.
But each time, the fear crowds back in, smothering the fires of creativity, suffocating the flow of stories, and I sit there once more, staring at a blank page and gasping.
And I'm tired of letting the fear win.
So I'm going to try something. It'll take time, far longer than any of my childhood writing projects. It may go unfinished for years, possibly unfinished full-stop (though I am certainly going to try my best to finish).
Because for the first time in a long time, I can feel a story bubbling up, itching to be told. Multiple stories in fact, so many little stories woven into a full and whole cloth to become something greater. An anthology stitched together by a meta story behind it.
And all of those stories, instead of shrivelling or withering, seem to be waiting patiently - not delicate mosses, but hardy fungi flourishing secretly in the dark, waiting for a chance to burst forth.
And I'm reminded that the fruiting body of a fungus, marshmallow-soft, can punch through concrete when it finally comes time to sprout forth.
So. I might not breathe stories like air any more... But perhaps I can cultivate them like mushrooms.
This blog is the embodiment of that hope. It's a promise to myself to at least TRY.
