Writing 

I used to write fiction.

Back in high school, I wrote horror stories/books. I hand wrote them first in a regular notebook (or 3) and then edited them and re-wrote them into composition books.  I’m pretty sure I still have the majority of those in a box in my basement. I plan to dig them out in the near future and go through them and see how they are, 15 years later.  I can’t tell you if they were horrible or mediocre or good.  I had a lot of friends that read my work, one that took it to her English class and read it for her book of choice.  Kudos to the teacher that let her.  Back then I felt that what I wrote was good.  The thing of it was, I was writing about shit I had no knowledge of.  I was writing based off of shit I had read or watched on TV, and teenage hormones. Not that I am a helluva lot more experienced now, but I have known real heart break, and I have known real love, and I have lost and fought for it.  I have known real terror, I have been in real car accidents and actually driven a car for christ sake.  I have fought my way up from the bottom and created a life for me and my children.  And while I haven’t travelled the world, or even a large portion of the United States, I have some real life experience.  And maybe what I wrote then was absolute garbage. And maybe it can be tweaked and salvaged.  We’ll see.  I’ll possibly publish some stuff on here to see what kind of response I get if I think the work is worth it.  There are a couple stories that come to mind that I fell in love with as I wrote them.  One was some tragic love story – I cried as I wrote the ending of that one at 3am, unable to sleep on a hot summer night.  Another is a story about a girl who was raped and how she got her revenge.  I named one of my cars after her.  How I wrote about something I never experienced is beyond me.  But I did because I thought one day, what would I do in a situation such as that?  And the words poured out.  No promises.  We’ll see what I find when I dig in those boxes.

I studied writing prompts on pintrest this evening.  I have a horrid headache and I’ve banished my children to the upstairs bedroom so I don’t have to hear them screech and argue because I may for real rip my ears off of my head if I have to hear that.  The traffic going by my window and the clicking of my nails on the keys of this little tablet keyboard are more than enough noise, thank you very much.  Not to mention the fact that I have not turned my tablet on in two weeks and it is set to receive all off my facebook notifications and it’s still catching up since my birthday was last weekend.  Oy vey.  

Anyway.  Off topic there a little.

So I got on pintrest and studied writing prompts because the itch is deep.  I feel the need to write again so strongly that it is distracting.  Like the house could catch on fire and I’d be like ummm so let me finish this paragraph and then I’ll get some water type shit.  The thing off it is, while I have the itch I don’t kow what to write about. Fiction is hard.  You have to create a character and a setting and basically just make some shit up and hope it works out into a good story.  I am not in that mind set. I saw a couple good prompts, one I toyed with for a minute, but it required too much thought and I abandoned it.  I saved it.  I’ll come back to it.  I did really like the idea.

When I wrote in high school, my characters were based on my friends. Loosely with little changes to keep them anonymous just in case I became famous. Not all of them, but a large portion. Creating characters has never been my strong point.  And I’m not the writer that sits down and makes a plan or web or whatever the fuck it was that our teachers had us do in school.  I just sit down and get to work.  I don’t have time to plan.  I do that enough in my every day life.  If the words flow, great.  If not, I leave it and come back to it.  And not that how I do it is right or how they do it is wrong.  This is just what works for me.  Anyway though, that was high school.  I can’t imagine using my friends as characters in a story.  Seems a little weird.  

I honestly don’t kow if I will ever write fiction again.  Apparently there’s this new thing called creative nonfiction that I think is more up my alley, what I’ve been doing here recently.  I have a lot to tell about my life.  A lot that I’ve been through and a lot that I think could benefit others.  I also wrote for the school newspaper, but journalism is actual work.  It requires actual facts, and the facts are that I don’t have time for more than a couple minutes of research here and there.  I know life.  I can tell you a lot.  I know about raising kids, and working while I raise them and learning to love yourself through it all.  

So, maybe you’ll see some fiction from me. Maybe you won’t.  I do appreciate each and every one of you reading this, whether you’ve been reading my work since we were in high school or only for the last month.  I’m glad you’re enjoying it.