The Writer, Me
Within the depths of my external hard drive, affectionately named Tara, awaits a folder entitled Scribbles. Should one open this folder, many others will be revealed, each with more folders and documents enveloped inside them. They all contain my creations: my poetry, short stories, and novels. All the relevant research I comb through for projects is tucked away in a Misc folder.
Back in the day (meaning the late 1990s to the early 2000s), I didn’t have a computer or laptop. I wouldn’t even get a Nokia Brick, my first phone, for a few more years. A plethora of notebooks, binders, and a variety of pens cluttered those years. Truly, it was chaos. It’s a wonder my mother never grabbed handfuls of it all to stuff in a barrel and burn.
My late cousin, Tabatha, was the one to ignite the passion for writing within me. She’d made the passing statement that I should write down the story I’d just finished telling her. Thus, I started my writing affair with the epic tales I was prone to telling. Knowingly running headfirst into a cliché, writing came as naturally to me as breathing.
It was the details that began to bog me down. I needed every last crumb to fall perfectly into place to feel satisfied with my stories. I needed to jot down every minuscule fragment of thought related to my writing lest it vanish into the void first. It was maddening, yet how could I stop?
As my interest in writing grew, I began reading more poetry volumes. The emotion and truth that went into the poems that I consumed were alluring and spoke to a deep need of my own. Having a history filled with trauma, I realized I could utilize poetry as an outlet. It was a way to pour out all the words my brain, heart, and soul needed to scream.
Poetry was my niche until I was almost out of high school. By then, I had begun dabbling in short stories and novellas. While I had successfully written multiple of each, none of them felt alive. None of them burned with that desire to be shared and devoured. None of them had that something that carried me from page to page without regard for the passing of time.
Over the years, many passion projects have come and gone. Some of them are cringy when I pull them from their cobwebbed compartments within the recesses of my mind while others fill me with regret and a longing for a completion that likely will never come. Of course, I keep them anyway. A writer should always keep their works no matter how cringy, dated, or atrocious they may seem. You never know when they can spontaneously become your next inspiration.
There are two main works that have encompassed the majority of my life as a writer. The first is a story for my mother, my beautiful and intelligent Mama Mattie. When I was in late middle to early high school a friend of mine gave me a stack of books that she no longer wanted. Among them was a book called Seven Tears Into the Sea by Terri Farley.
It’s an enchanting book about selkies, seal-folk who can shed their seal skins when they come onto land and become human. My mother loved this book immensely and wanted her own Selkie story. Thus, I began to research and write. Her selkie story, now with the working title of Torrential, has seen many transformations over the last 15 or so years but has never made it past the first chapter. Mama Mattie does her due diligence in reminding me that I still owe her a selkie story for the ages.
My second work is a story born of a dream, as most of my works find me. Another 15+ year project, it has been the most transformative work I’ll likely ever manage. Originally called Ensphere, the now-titled Shadowstrung trilogy is my all-encompassing passion project. It began as a simple story of fate, endurance, and companionship but evolved when I met my partner Galen and we discovered that the story he was working on seemed to fit together with mine rather elegantly.
Since then, we have gone rounds with this project. All the characters have been renamed countless times, their personalities tweaked, their relationships fine-tuned. The novel became a trilogy. Main characters faded into the background while supporting characters moved to the forefront. All these years later, only the bare bones of SST hold a resemblance to the original concepts of Ensphere.
In early 2022, I made an incredibly difficult decision to put both of these projects down. After 15ish years with little legitimate progress, I felt like I needed something fresh. I needed to see what lay beyond the boundaries of these stories in which I had so deeply burrowed. I spent the rest of the year compiling all of my notes for each so that when I return to them, it will all still make sense.
For the month of Dec 2022, I considered what type of stories I would like to write and I came up with 3 to work on over the next few years. My current work-in-progress is named A Hiss of Sparks. It has been unbelievably arduous to step into this new concept, to stay focused on something ultimately foreign to my mind. I also deal with Autism, ADHD, mental illness, and chronic pain, none of which help the creative process.
Here we find ourselves in May 2023, and I am no closer to having an organized concept of what to write for any of my 3 new projects than I did when they were conceived five months ago. Innately a pantser, I’ve even begun dabbling with plotting and structure to help me to organize. While so far it has been to no avail, I have faith that something will click into place. Until then, I will simply have to try and try again.
