Writing, dreams and the pursuit

I started dreaming of being an author in elementary school. I'm not sure what grade I was in, but I remember walking to my Grandma's after school. The Martian Chronicles had been airing every night on television, and it seems to me that the Carter - Reagan campaign was in full swing, so there was a bunch of talk about the Soviet Union. Walking to Grandma's I started dreaming about writing and publishing a book called The Russian Chronicles. In my elementary mind it was going to be six volumes, each volume being about 1000 pages, and it would of course be a run away bestseller, made into a movie and a weekly television show. Of course in elementary school I also dreamed of being a pro-athlete (in about any sport you can think of), a preacher, an astronaut, and eventually the President.

In high school the pro athlete dreams began to diminish a little when it was a struggle for me to start on a class "D" JV team. As I struggled to start for the Colon Magi, I began to wonder what my chances were of making even a really bad pro team. The pro dreams are mostly dead, though in my most delusional moments I still wonder about the senior - I mean - champions tour in golf.

While the pro-athlete dreams have slowly died, the dreams of being a writer have remained. The dream remained during college, as my roommate and I would stay-up late talking about what we were reading, and how much life experience we would need before we could really be writers.

The dream remained in my early twenties. I purchased a lined notebook and wrote in the front cover, The works of John West complete and unabridged. (That was a fairly short volume - Three pages). The dream remained in my mid-twenties when I saw my old college roommate for the first time in a few years, and told him confidently, "I'll be published by the time I'm thirty." The dream was still alive in my late twenties when I helped start a writer's group and actually did some writing. (I think then is when I first came to grips with the fact that in order to get a book published, I would actually have to write one).

The dream remained in my early thirties, as I settled into being a dad. In my early thirties the conviction grew that if I wanted to write I better get at it pretty soon. In my mid - thirties I actually started a story and plugged away at it for awhile. Then life got pretty crazy, and I went back to school, but by that point I had plugged away at that story long enough, that I actually had about 15,000 words. It's tough to altogether walk away from 15,000 words. I had a sense that I was just putting it on hold until life became less crazy.

Well, life really never got less crazy, in fact I changed jobs, and we moved for awhile into my sister's basement with our four kids, while they lived upstairs with their six kids. In the midst of the craziness, I simply decided that I needed to finish, that life might never feel less crazy to me until I was eighty, and who knows if I'll make it that far. So, bad timing or not I started writing again. I made a log book for myself, and kept track of the dates and how much I wrote. I wrote in the free moments at work and I wrote in the free moments at home.

By October of 2007 I had gotten to about 50,000 words, and I could see how the story was going to end, so I made a goal of finishing by Christmas. Two months later I had around 77,000 words. From my perspective, some of it was pretty awful, some was ok, and some was actually not bad. At any rate it was done. Now here's the thing, even though the end results were mixed there was and is something beautiful about the pursuit. There is beauty in actually doing the work, whether or not the end results are themselves beautiful.

So I start this blog as a way of encouraging myself to continue at the pursuit. Who knows where the chase may lead...