The Snowball Effect

It's happening again. I can feel it. The act of writing in itself begets more writing. Whatever the outcome of this little experiment, its success is already evident to me. Those mosquitos are probing the fat, juicy veins, poised to plunge their suckers and drink a hearty brew. Drink! Sate yourself, and fall, bloated, to the page. I'll write with my blood until there's not a drop left. That's what it is to be a writer; that's what I had misplaced for so long. I forgot why I began writing in the first place. Not to publish (though I'd be heehawwing like a stubborn ass to deny it crossing my mind), not to please others or impress the girls, not for my parents, not for those who said I could nor those who believed I could not. Not even for me. I wrote (is is too presumptious at this point to declare that verb in the present tense??) because I had to. Because there seemed no alternative.

I remember clearly the first days of that journey almost a decade ago. I volunteered for a layoff from the high tech company I had been cubiclized within for 3 years, and decided on a whim it had to be then or never. I wrote, tentatively at first, plodding circuitously, until a few rough-hewn nuggets fell to the page. Momentum building, furious, frenetic bursts followed. Alabaster pages filled, one by one, with the cumulative trappings of a mind set free. And the more I wrote the more I believed I could write; that I was supposed to be writing. That I was meant to write.

I also beleived the book would be published within the year, and fame and fortune would follow. What a dumbass. But I can live with being a dumbass. What I've struggled with is being a dumbass who no longer writes. That's crippling. Debilitating. A bloody cancer that'll eviscerate you, if you don't take your meds.