Merry Christmas to everyone. I hope everyone had a magical day full of happiness. I also wish everyone a wonderful New Year. I am not someone who makes resolutions for the New Year and instead try to make resolutions often throughout the year to be happy or find a way to do that. Yet, as we start 2012 I wish everyone a year of happiness any way that they find it.
Many of you may have noticed, and commented, that I have not posted anything in over a month. That is very true. I have spent that month a bit stressed, busy, tired and pulled in a million different directions. Most of that involves work but the holidays added to that. I did not get a chance to post here on my blog, or write in my journal or even write on my novel. I missed it all. I missed being able to open my pink, leather-bound journal and release the stress I was feeling, coming to my blog and sharing with everyone the process and thrills and horrors I have experienced in writing my first novel, but even more I missed actually writing. I missed writing in my novel and even missed the characters as if they were real people and we are living this story together, which in a sense we are.
Christmas has ended and though work will still be busy and stressful I was able to take a little time and look back at my novel and do some writing on it which exhilarated me. Many of my friends and family laugh at me but when I do get to write it energizes me and I get excited. I was able to find that excitement again. I am in the midst of editing chapter nine and have almost finished writing chapter ten and that thrills me because my characters are back in my life again. We are moving the story along and I am living with them again. So, I am also back on the blogosphere again as well and it is a welcomed return.
This time away from my writing though being caused by my job made me realize how much life can interfere with what we have planned. We all dream as kids of the grand career. For my son it was to be a train engineer. For me, I was going to be a dancer or a writer. My baby sister was going to drive a bus, have ten kids and purple hair and take lots of aspirin. Needless to say not all of us get to do our dream jobs or have our dream lives but as adults try to find little dreams that are similar to keep that joy we had as kids. Writing has always been my dream. My mother used to have a fit with me because I wrote on EVERYTHING! I would write on my clothes, on furniture and on the walls. She was always chasing after me with toothpaste to clean off what I did on the walls.
Sometimes though life interrupts these dreams just as it did when we were kids and our dreams would change or the world would intercede and make them difficult to accomplish. We can either lay those dreams down and never pick them up again, we can change them to work around the difficulties or we can use the difficulties to push us forward in what we really want. I would love to have that rare movie image of a writer where I sit in my beautiful home on the beach where my office and work space looks out over the ocean and vacation in the south of France for inspiration. That is not the reality though.
The dictionary defines reality as something that exists independently of all other things and from which all other things derive. I don't know that I really like that definition. To me that means our dreams and reality are separate. The dream is that I want to be a writer and do that full time. The reality is that it takes work to be a writer and it isn't like in the movies. You have to love writing to really be a writer and consider yourself a writer.
This past Christmas I got one of the best presents I may have ever gotten in my life. It was a book from my boss titled Writer with a Day Job by Aine Greaney an Irish author. I love this book. It gives exercises writers can do to help them in the creative process and gives inspiration to those of us who are the majority of writers. The ones I call superhero writers because we are workers at our job by day. We go to that nine to five job and work hard, we commute with the masses to the office, we maintain the professional persona by day and at night or during our free time, often stolen at lunch or when commuting, we are our superhero persona. We are writers. We are dreamers and psychologists and anthropologists and narrators. We are what writers really are today. Jane Austen would be working as a secretary today for a boss she probably hated and then use that as fodder for her stories. Walt Whitman may have been a construction worker by day and a poet by night. Superman has nothing on today's writers.
To be this superhero type of writer though you have to really love writing in a way that you love breathing. I was unable to write for a month and felt as if I were fading or losing a limb. My pen is an extension of my hand and my story sits and moves in my brain even as I type this. To go a month without writing was necessary for my job but also hard. What I love about my new book is that it gives ideas to help get through the busy times. As I did one day when I snuck out of work for a quick lunch break and went to my new favorite writing spot and in the cold sat outside in front of my Mexican revolutionary ready to shoot, don't worry it is a statue. There I sat and watched the people around me and I wrote in my journal and just that thirty minute break to write revived me more than any medicine and let me get through my week.
So now I wake up early and grab my cup of coffee and my pen and paper or I sit on my train or steal away at lunch and just as Clark Kent would use the telephone booth to change into superman I too go to my spot and change in my superhero character, Anne Brenner the writer. I may not save your cat from a tree or fly you away from danger but my hope is that I am able to entertain you. So as you walk into that coffee house or by the bench with the man sitting in a business suit and a pen and paper in hand you can smile to yourself because superheros do exist and you may have just passed one.
