I realized I wasn’t breathing when
my vision started to go grey and I felt myself tipping off the back of my old
stool that sat in front of my first ever new laptop. I had had the stool for
ten years. Before it sat in front of my vary old Casio where I made music. The
laptop was a Mac, new and purple. The thing on the screen that had caused such
dizziness and shock was an email from school. Well, two emails from school. The
first said something like “Congratulations, you are invited to the Symposium of
Scholarship and Creativity” and then went on to tell me the program. That meant
honors in English.
For years, my dad has reminded how
expensive my orthodoction was. He told me about my Spec Ops brother who had his
school and house bought for him by the US Air Force. He told me about my other
brothers and how they both got many offers from private colleges for full-ride
scholarships. They all went on to do great things. Then there was me. Not even
out of high school and had a record amount of dental bills and medical issues
with joints, breathing, and brain activity. That’s why I remembered to breath
when I saw the email: don’t disappoint dad now! He said that if I was going to
graduate, I had to do it with honors. Or not at all. Everyone else before had.
The second email was about
graduation. I have no idea what it said now. All I know was that it was about
graduation and it was talking to me. I’ve lived in 3 states and gone to for
colleges in the last 3 years and have been in college for six. I never thought
graduation would come. But it has. And this has been a fantastic year. Last
semester was better. I wrote a novel, a novelette, 3 short stories, and plotted
an entire series.
This semester, I struggled to get
twenty-five pages out. Fortunately, I told myself, “It’s only twenty-five. Last time, you could do that in three days
without editing. A week with.” I kept remember my first class in Cap Stone. “I
reall really want to be a writer,” I had said like a high school freshman.
I had to remind myself of that kid
to get any writing this semester. My parents think that science and math are
the be-all end-all of the universe. I had to take statistics this semester. I
wish I could just blame the four hours a day I spent studying on that for my
lack of writing this semester. I say lack, but I did get two short stories and
twenty-seven pages of some kind of supernatural novelette written. The point
was that it wasn’t the amount of last semester and that’s what I wanted. But I
had to get a B+ in stats. That is not happening.
I had to remind myself of my much
younger-last-semester-self because I wasn’t writing. I was working hours on a
class that doesn’t matter. I was crying at night over formulas I will never see
again. I don’t know how many there are, but I have learned thirty new ones just
this semester. I can tell you the probability that someone will kick a field
goal this year. But that will not help Glenn, my paladin-knight from a long
novel, claim the dragon-throne for his own and show the world how the lines
between power and corruption are thin. No, instead that formula stopped Glenn
from even existing in my head for some time.
Like all bipolar, depressed kids, I
went for an escape but didn’t have the brainpower to write it away. I couldn’t
even read. So I played online games. But there, in the battlenet chatrooms I
was guilt tripped again. Some user had the audacity to call themselves
Claredy-catgirl99. Clare is another character of mine. It was as though writing
was calling me beyond the isolation room I had sent it off to.
I was distracted by gaming nonsense
and mathematical nonsense. More than learning cool writing techniques (and that
when I write non-fiction I apparently demean men) I learned to prioritize.
Again. I learned that back in grade school, but I had to relearn. Rather than
stay up to all hours screaming at my calculator as I typed in wrong integers
again, or instead of logging on to League of Legends, I started to write again.
It was very, very hard.
I had a run-in with someone from my
parents church who told me about how great religion was so I wrote about them.
Religion then become an automaton in a steampunk story where God was
represented by the a grandfather clock. The Man ran away in the end and it was
all very sad, but it may be my favorite story. It was very literary and I tried
a lot of techniques in it. Trying to write like a writer really got me back
into writing.
That was all it took though. I know
writing and I are destined to be together now. A little nudge and I was hammering
away till 2am rather than crying until 2am. I wrote more on my Golmasiah series
in which Hypria discovers new islands and tries to combat hunger with magic. I
found myself tying that post-colonialism and poverty in the world today. It is
a rather odd commentary, I admit, but one I was very interested in tackling. It
also helped me tackle the age-old question of “why don’t wizards just make
magic food?” Because it goes really wrong. Like eating food that’s been touched
by large amounts of radiation.
I also had to learn to not hold
onto everything I wrote. I’ve been learning that for years but this strange,
supernatural thriller I have going on may be the cherry. When I started writing
it, it wasn’t supernatural. I didn’t know what it was. A travel narrative
maybe. But then it got weird when the main character ended up at a crossroads.
I think I was writing the story as an analogy of itself. It may still be. I
don’t know. But that is the twenty-seven pages I got out this semester. I doubt
I’ll keep it. But it was practice. I used to say that I only when inspiration
strikes. That can’t be true for me any more. If I want to be a writer, I need
to write—anything!—every day. Practice. How will I know if I am saying
something the wrong way if I haven’t tried it? I say, write all the time and
makes mistakes all the time so I know, all the time, what not to do. And what to
practice.
If I write everyday, there is a
chance that I will write a description or scene twenty times in a month. Maybe
in different stories but similar scenes. One will be better than the other nineteen.
That means there is a .052 chance that I write something good once a month if I
write every day. Oh, look there, Statistics! Maybe it’s not worthless after
all?
That chance isn’t that big, but it’s
bigger than the next person who only writes when inspired. That means that they
write far less and have far less of a chance of getting it right. This semester
was a struggle, but I learned what it takes to keep writing. And if I want to
be a writer, I must keep writing. Every day.
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