And here we go...

A beautiful writer named Alice once told me that the most important thing is not what you write or how well you write, but that you write at all.

I suppose somewhere along the way I forgot about this rule, because what inevitably happens when I begin is that I can't recognize the writer I once was, and the frustration leaves me sick of my own words. I've left behind many stories.

So many characters.

The funny thing is that the best writers are ones who did not create their characters, but let their characters create themselves. I wonder if the young girl with the rare variation of color-blindness has gotten to find out what blue means. Or if April's day got better - did her boyfriend finally propose? What did Sarah's baby boy look like, and did Andrew step up to the responsibilities of a father? How did Brian Shaw feel about his son's lie?

I should feel like I let them down, but I'm sure they feel it through me already.
I have been convinced for some time that I simply have lost any and all feeling, and that this loss has killed the writer inside me.

My best times writing fiction were when I was at my lowest. I could only write when I was unhappy because the emotions were strongest then. My last works of pure beauty were written in the final months of my grandmother's life, and after that I thought maybe I had lost it all, because no point could go lower than that. No sadness could ever compare.

Right now I'm happy.

All I want to do is talk about it.
Not here. I can't do that here in detail.
I can't really do it anywhere in detail.

But I can feel that passion that I had at one point welling up in me again, and I have realized that my inspiration did not come from sadness or anger, but from feeling in general. My passion wasn't locked in the lower parts of myself, but I'd simply convinced myself that it must be because of who I was during the majority of my time as a writer.

Who am I now?
That's a question I am tackling every day.
You can't be someone until you know who you are.

But I do know I am a writer, no matter how my talent has shifted or what I need to recapture and learn how to weave again.

Writing is the desire to share something. I want to describe and define. I don't care if it's a walk down the street, an easy character, or an elaborate fantasy world.
I want to explore language again. I want to sort out the cacophony in my head so that I can file away the insecurities and articulate the music. I want to play with my vocabulary and relearn how to fit completely unrelated words into one coherent character.

Fortunately I think this is a good mix: the low chance of anyone running across this will keep me free, while the chance at all will keep me at least slightly contained.

Here goes nothing.