Courage Journey

  I finished draft one on Monday, 4/5/21, but it took me almost a week to post about it just because I've been emotionally drained. I knew that might happen, I'd heard as much from other writer friends who've told me how the high of finishing was immediately accompanied by overwhelming and competing thoughts like "holy shit what now?" and "is it any good" and "there's a million things to change" and "where do I start" and "i need a break." I decided to take example from Greta, who took about 3-4 weeks off after her last draft to refill her own well.  She spent time reading, working on an old short story, and engaging some writing prompts so she could come back to the work with fresh eyes and some distance.  Sounds perfect to me.   I've been on a fiction hiatus since about mid-January in an attempt to further focus my efforts on my own writing, and it's created a void in me that definitely needs to be filled.  As ...

FIVE SCENES LEFT.  Five.  FIVE!!!  Holy crap.  By this time next week I should be done.  Only five weeks over my original goal, which isn't too bad! I wish I had more to say right now, but really at this point it's just the mental race to the finish and staying on task to get it done and not get sidetracked with procrastination.

Ten scenes left.  Ten scenes.  I can hardly believe it.  There seems to be so much to wrap up in just ten scenes.  So many ends to tie.  It's making me a little nervous, just because I've been fans of shows where I've felt the same way as the project nears the "end".  "Only three episodes left?  And they have to wrap up all of THIS [insert litany of open ended items]?  IMPOSSIBLE. In a few cases, I've breathed and said, "It'll be okay, just trust the writers" and they've delivered.  When they deliver, when it all comes together and you see the big picture in its full scope and you feel excited, satisfied, and complete?  Man that's good stuff.  (There's a reason Schitt's Creek is winning awards.  And I will be a fan of the writing on The Good Place until I hopefully end up there myself.) But there have been even more times when I've tried to trust the writers and it all ended in a steaming pile of hot shit as if the writer...

I think my inner child needs a nap.  The Artist's Way has me thinking about her a lot.  Not just thinking about her, actually.  I'm supposed to spend time with her each week and let me tell you, she's exhausting.  Her appetite for creative outlets is, let's say, healthy.  She's reminding me of all of these artistic endeavors that delighted me when I was younger.   I had forgotten the months dedicated to honing my calligraphy skills after we had one class about it in high school art.  I had forgotten the yearning poems of my thirteen year-old self that I'd bravely submitted to the school newspaper in hopes of being "seen" on a deeper level by somebody.  I'd forgotten about my well intended but ill performed attempts at acting in middle school.  About the even worse attempts at singing in musicals, blissfully ignorant that I was holding notes only dogs could hear.  About the years devoted to baton twirling before changing my mind to t...

Chapter 7 opened with a scene at the waterfront, one of my favorite places at real life camp.  It's a place of zen in spite of the organized chaos.  Whenever I'm there, I close my eyes for a moment to drink in the sound around me.  The happy shrieks of campers being playfully splashed.  The roar of a counselor pretending to be a lion as they tromp around the shallow end with more kids dangling off their back than should be humanly possible.  The thump, thump, thump of wet feet padding the planks of the pier toward the deep end, just shy of running, but racing all the same.  The thwap of a life jacket smacking the water, the last piece of a swim test so close to being completed once they click that strap into place.  The far away voices carrying across the water as rowboats drift further away.  The giggles of a counselor being buried in the sand matched by the giggles of the kid doing the burying.  The slap of UNO cards on the nearest picnic t...

One of the reasons I started this book was to give myself space to confront very real feelings.  As I said in my first post , despite the sheer highs that camp produces, there are also a lot of low lows.  Chief among the lows for me is grief.   Grief about the literal pain the kids endure through treatment, about the way their lives have been changed, and about the people they could've been.  Grief about the loss they feel in their own lives, about friendships created and changed through relapse, and about the old fashioned, straight up kind of grief that comes from death.  Their deaths.  Their friend's deaths.  The death of the kid who shared their cabin last year that they never connected with so now they carry deep regret with them right next to the grief.  Grief comes in so many shapes, sizes, and colors at camp that it's kind of a constant.  For me, processing grief is a little bit like being a parent whose kid is pulling at their p...

Last week, thanks to a suggestion from my friend Brooke, I read Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic .  It was one of those experiences where you read or hear something at exactly the moment you need to read or hear it.  Maybe you've been told the same message before but this fifth, twelfth, hundredth time it clicks in a way that it never did before.  That's what reading her book was like for me.   Big Magic got me thinking about how long I've let creativity live in a shadow world that I was ignoring.  Deciding to write this book about my camp experience was like creaking open a door and peaking into a dark room, uncertain about whether to go inside.  It was a sudden realization that I hadn't given myself permission to cross the threshold.  I hadn't given myself over to writing yet.   Yes, I have been speaking it into the universe that my goal is to publish.  Yes, I've been doing the work behind the scenes to learn more about craft work a...