There is no Fate but What We Make

   Ok, so the book I promised to release by the end of March is still not done on the second of May.  My novella, which I soooo optimistically expected to finish (two weeks after starting) hasn't been as easy to piece together as I imagined it would be.
   Diary of an Immortal is a re-working of some of my favorite parts from the novel I've been working on.
   For three fucking years.
 I thought I could simply weave these pieces together from my main character's point of view, then slap that sucker up on Kindle and the world would be a better place. Sadly, this has not been the way of it. Damn you, every author who has ever written a book in two weeks! Thank you for raising the bar to unreachable heights for the rest of us!
   As I'm finally nearing the end of this writing nightmare experience, I sometimes have to stop and reflect on the perilous and magnificent journey that it is. I think there must be gazillions of people who feel just like I did before I started writing---that something vital has always been missing in their lives. I knew there was some mysterious untapped potential deep inside me; something I wanted badly but that seemed so impossible in my youth I that I chose to bury it before it really got its hooks in me.
 I come from a family of musicians, and at an early age I knew some of the most talented singers I could ever hope to hear had looked for that 'big break' so long that their talent had become overshadowed by their desperation. I recognized this at eight or nine years old, and it terrified me. I did not want to grow up and become a victim of my own dreams. These artists with voices like angels had followed their dreams and it got them nowhere. At my most impressionable, I learned that talent was by no menas a guarantee for success. On the contrary; the most famous and successful singers I knew of at the time were mediocre when compared to the ones I truly admired.

  Now and then throughout my life I saw glimpses of my own buried dream. And I knew if I ever found the courage, I could nurture it into something extrordinary---or at the very least, something far less ordinary than the never-fail path I chose instead.
   Somewhere in the back of my mind I always knew I was a writer. I think back to the seventh grade, when life was easy and I could choose to read Macbeth and Jane Eyre and The Canterbury Tales and Little Women and The Secret Garden and all the other ancient books with tattered canvas covers in my tiny school library; just because it made me feel sad that no one ever read the ugly ones. Aside from these moldy classics of literature, that year I also read such books as Our Hearts Were Young and Gay; Going On Seventeen and You Give Me a Pain, Elaine--as well as countless others. These were books I had never heard of at the time and have never heard of since. But after twenty-five years I still remember many of the titles and almost all of the characters. I can't remember the authors or the settings or even the names, but I remember the people. They were not characters to me then. They were people.  I remember what they thought and how they felt and what they did and who they knew. Whenever I glanced the yellowed library card in the sleeve of the back cover, it broke my heart to see how many of them had not been checked out in twenty years or more. That was longer than I had  been alive! What a tragedy!
  I read them all because not a single one had the eye-catching frills to entice any seventh grader in the world, and I feared another twenty years might pass before some twelve-year old as strange as me came along. The people in those books deserved more than that. They deserved to have all the empty spaces on their library cards filled with names. They deserved to be read.
 For all I know those poor old books are still there, with their yellowed library cards bearing my signature from 1986 in the last filled spot on a card full of blank spaces.
   When my girlfriends were reading Sweet Valley High or sneaking their mother's Harlequin Romances into Study Hall, they always rolled their eyes when they caught me reading one of those "weird old books" from the library. What I couldn't tell those girls then was that I read those old books because it broke my heart to think of them sitting untouched for years, with no one to realize the untapped potential inside them.
   So I suppose the purpose of this rant is to say that even at twelve years old, I knew my attachment to stories was unusual. When I skipped fifty days of school my senior year, it pissed off my English teacher to no end that I aced her unit test on Macbeth. She knew I hadn't been in class more than a handful of times in the weeks she covered the material. What she didn't know was that I had devoured it five years before and remembered every word. That didn't seem odd to me at the time. I mean, didn't people sometimes read Shakespeare for fun? Did those preppy bitches and rednecks and jocks not realize Shakespeare was awesome? Why was my teacher so pissed off that I passed?
    Because I deserved to fail, of course. I was a hundred times worse than a dumb kid. I was a lazy kid with a passion for literature---which she obviously had a passion for too, since she taught English Lit for chrissakes. My smugness was offensive to her. The nerve I had, showing up like that after ditching all that time! It wasn't fair to the other kids. There were others much smarter than me who tried much harder, yet still struggled with that particular class. My teacher wasn't going to waste her time on me anymore. In spite of any potential I might have had, I still missed fifty fucking days of school. No kid could get away with that now. I shouldn't have got away with it either. Somebody should've smacked me real hard and told me to stop feeling sorry for myself just because I was too chicken shit to pursue my dreams.

   This post doesn't even resemble the one I planned to write an hour ago. Yes, it has taken me an hour to write this how-ever-many-words-this-post-is. That's probably pretty slow to you folks who turn out novels in two weeks. But for me, that ain't too shabby. As long as it reminds someone of a time when they felt their own potential breathing inside them so unmistakably that they were scared to death.
 Because that's how you know what your passion is. It takes over everything, if you're doing it right.
Next time you feel it breathing, just let it have you. You'll thank me later.