Back In The Saddle Again, So To Speak

Tonight I dug around my house and found all of my writing materials. I must admit, it was a search. I knew I had left all my stuff in a breast cancer shopping bag that I bought at Safeway for a $1.00 donation. I looked in my closet, I looked under my bed. I went outside and looked under the seats of my car. I found the breast cancer bag, but it was empty. I searched the garage, well as much as a quick glance around can be called searching and I asked my son if he had seen any of it. No luck. I was beginning to panic, so I went out to the garage again and did a slightly more thorough "search" and what do you know? I found it. In a completely different but exactly the same breast cancer shopping bag. Phew! I was sweating for a minute there.

So I sat down and pulled out all of my papers and started sorting through them. I found my printed out document for Jack & Carly and with it was a note from my friend Vera who I asked (over a year ago) to read what I had so far and give me her feedback. I did this knowing she would be brutally honest with me, she wouldn't spare my feelings. If it sucked, she would tell me, and that's what I needed. The good news? She said the only thing she hated about it was that it wasn't complete. *snoopy dance* She gave me a list of items that she either had questions or comments about. It's a good list. She caught things that I didn't pick up on and she caught things that I knew in my head and just didn't bother to share with the reader. Important stuff!

So tonight I sat down and went over her notes. I'm not going to tell you what they were because I'm vain and I don't want you to know what mistakes I made, I want you to think I'm BRILLIANT all by myself. Don't tell Vera. Going over her comments and questions had me looking over parts of the story that I hadn't remembered I wrote and questioning where sections were that I was pretty sure I had written. I guess I must have taken them out.....I dunno, but it got me back into the spirit of my story and I'm very psyched.

I have scenes running over and over my head. The characters are screaming to be heard and I can't type fast enough to keep up with them all. I have to remind them that I do need to sleep and work. Dammit.

So in the spirit of Jack & Carly and all that they mean to me I wanted to share with all of you that I am back in the saddle. Or maybe it's the computer chair, but either way I'm back on the write track again. Get it?

Dreams

"There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, 'Yes, I've got dreams, of course I've got dreams.' Then they put the box away and bring it out once in awhile to look in it, and yep, they're still there. These are great dreams, but they never even get out of the box. It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line, to hold them up and say, 'How good or how bad am I?' That's where courage comes in.” ― Erma Bombeck

So I've become a person with a box of dreams. I don't quite know how it happened, but there it is. A box. It's not even a pretty box. It's plain and paper bag brown. It's not very heavy, which is surprising. With all of the things that it holds you think it would weight a ton. Turns out dreams don't weigh very much, it's the product of dreams that carry the weight. A dream is only a thought. Sometimes fleeting, sometimes constant, but it's nothing substantive, not until you put it into action.

I've decided to take one of my dreams out of the box and put it into action. I was sitting down with a friend of mine tonight and I was looking through my previous blogs for a specific entry, which I didn't find, and I saw all of the ideas that I had swimming around in my head, the summaries that I had put onto paper. It's my dream to write. It's my dream to be published. It's my ULTIMATE dream to make enough money writing to be able to do it full-time. So why is it that I can't seem to find the time to do it? Why is it that I push it aside? I can admit that sometimes it's just because I'm lazy. I work 6 days a week and on my one day off I like to sit around and vegetate or watch football, or baseball, or Arrow. I mean really, who can't get behind a couple of hours of Oliver Queen? But that's not what I dream of. Okay, it's hardly what I dream of. Sometimes I dream of Oliver Queen, but I swear it's not often.

So, that's what I'm going to do. Stop dreaming and start acting. I want to finish at least one story this year. Even if it sucks. I have a variety that I could choose from. Jack & Carly, Megan, the actress & the bodyguard, the murder mystery. I just have to finish one of them. It doesn't have to be ready to send out to anyone, just complete. Baby steps.