Costco is Apparently One of my Muses

            The other day I was shopping for diapers, when I happened to come across a book signing.  Several things happen in quick succession when I see an author at Costco.  Usually, I  avoid eye contact.  Then pity strikes.   Everyone else is probably doing the same thing that I'm doing, and ignoring the them.  Jerks.  I think of that poor author, sitting there for hours, without anyone to talk to, and that makes me feel guilty enough to take a look at the book.  If I'm honest with myself, signed books are my kryptonite.  So I'm not just buying books out of a sense of guilt.  A book signed by the author with a personalized message goes a long way.   On this particular day, the author was a little girl.  I almost stopped in my tracks.  I couldn't believe it.  She's published at that age?  Seriously??  And everyone is buying her book because...Hello!  She's twelve!  She's adorable, and the book is like $5.  Heck yeah!  I'll support you!  I had her write a note to my little girls and she even threw in a smiley face.  Cute.

 

            As I make my way through the checkout line the cashier scans my items and holds it up, "Oh! You're buying THE book!" she gushes.  

 

             "It looks so cute.  And I'm just blown away that the girl's already published!"

             "Do you know what that says to me?"  the cashier asks giving me a conspiratorial glance.  "Good parenting."  I have to agree.  It kind-of made me want to ask the girl's mother, who had been sitting sitting right beside her, "How did you go about the whole publishing thing?”  I really want to know.  

 

            This is a new development for me, wanting to know how to be published.  I have always written in one form or another.  I've kept a journal since I could hold a pencil.  In high school I wrote essays, in college, papers.  But, most of the writing I've done was so boring, so mandatory.  Books that I had to read, poems I had to analyze.    Then my English classes were cut off all together as I decided on a degree.  I'd thought having to write technical English papers was bad, writing technical engineering papers was so much worse.  My reading and writing pleasures were sandwiched in-between classes and studies.  I missed the beauty of the English language. I would carry around second-hand novels, sit in the USU library cafe, and sip cups of hot cocoa.  I can still feel the sunlight pouring through those obscenely large windows.  I wished the sunshine could burn away all the sterileness in my world.  

              That period in my life taught me that I really missed creative writing.  I kept a blog, and continued journaling.  It was such a fabulous outlet.  I wrote about my crappy boss that I had as an intern who kept me locked up in an office writing the same dumb computer program for 10 hours a day, 4 days a week for an entire summer.  Psh.  I still hate that guy.  I poured more of my thoughts and feelings into my journals then is probably healthy.  I really hope no one ever reads them because, let's face it, I have an ridiculous amount of journals for someone my age who has done very little and been very few places.  Still, I would wake up in the morning, and a re-occurring quote from Walden would pop into my mind, "Morning is the philosopher's hour." So I would seize the morning, and the clarity of thought that came with it.  It has become my favorite time to write.  I found myself writing things in my head-my next blog, a story I had yet to scribble down, even some poetry.

 

            It hasn't been until recently, after a book binge that lasted half a year, that I finally set down a novel and thought, I could do that.  So, I grabbed an empty notebook and resolved to fill it. I'd had an idea for a story that had been growing in my mind for a few years.  Writing a novel, it turns out, is a lot harder than I thought it would be.  Surprise, surprise.  And now days it seems like you have to have some great oppression in order for your book to be successful.  You need to be gay, or come from a third world country.  Do we really need to take the oppression so far?  What happened to writing for the pleasure of writing?  Or the freedom that it offers?  I found with writing, the only limits are the ones that you make yourself.  I can go against the natural and man-made laws that I studied so faithfully all those years.  Maybe knowing so much about them can work for me.  One of my favorite authors wrote that good fiction has a foothold in the real world.  If you put a bit of science in magic and fantasy, it makes it more palatable.  I sincerely hope so.

      

            So what do I want to do with all of this?  The self-realization?  The opportunity?  Let me be candid:  I have no idea.  I haven't really even found my writing style or my voice yet.  I'm at the very beginning.  But, I heard once that you're meant to do the thing that you think about in your free time.  The thing that creeps into your brain as you're rinsing your hair out in the shower.  That's an intimidating and powerful idea.  My writing is far below the standard I want it to be.  I have a lot of work to do if I ever want to fill the gap between how I want to be able to write, and what my current skills actually are.  But, if a twelve year old girl can do it, so help me, I can too.