The Shackled Writer Part II

mystery door
The Shackled Writer didn’t have to search for mysterious doors or draw circles on the ground to create magic portholes to other places.

And he still doesn’t but he looks for those places everywhere he goes, even when he is talking in third person and not using words like you and I.

So let’s correct that have a conversation about this and that.

When I was a kid I watched some movie whose name I cannot remember and was fascinated when the kids in it discovered the castle they were living in had secret rooms and passages.

Ever since then I have wanted to live in a place like that because I knew I was born to have adventures and I figured what better way to have them then in your own castle.

I have been part of a few adventures both as a child and as an adult and have been thinking about writing about some of them.  But when I looked at some of the words I put down on the page I grew frustrated because what I had written didn’t measure up.

And then I remembered the words from the first Shackled Writer post.

Good Writing Is Scary

Good writing is scary and great writing is so fucking frightening the sweat drips off of your forehead and onto the keyboard.

I don’t believe that to be an exaggeration either nor is it a necessity, but sometimes it helps.

If I could sing in the manner I want to you would hear a voice that could make you weep or make your heart sing. That is what I want from my words. I want them to make you smile and think.

And sometimes I want you to read them and feel gutted. Sometimes I want to reach inside your chest and make your heart ache in a way that leaves you breathless and amazed.

When I don’t pour my heart out or bleed at the keyboard I get frustrated because I feel like I didn’t put enough into my work. That is the source of some of my frustration.

I realized I had been holding back listening to the whispers of that internal editor and that had stolen some of the joy I normally find in writing.

So I spent some time reading and thinking about what had led me to the place where I wrote the first post about the Shackled Writer and I remembered the feeling.

And then I realized that part of my frustration is tied into the changes that are coming and this feeling that some of them are going to be major.

It doesn’t mean that I fear to make them because fear is the wrong word but the anticipation is getting old. The image in my head is what I have heard the beginning of a tsunami looks like.

The tide is out and the water is being pulled into a massive wave that is just starting to form.

I am staring at the wet sand and looking at the shiny objects that were left behind but I sense the monster wave that is going to come crashing down.

But I do not intend to let it catch me unaware.

It will not crash down upon my head. I am going to ride this one all the way back in.

Anticipation

What has me wound up now is anticipation. I feel like I have a pretty damn good idea what is going to happen and I am growing anxious waiting for the wave to break because I can’t take the next steps until it does.

Ask me what door I intend to choose and I won’t answer, not because I am wrestling with intuition and desire but because there are some boundaries in blogging.

You don’t need to know every thought but I will tell you that what I do will be based upon doing the best I can to help my kids and myself.

Or maybe what I am saying is that I am in the midst of an adventure and that I am excited, maybe even a little frightened.  But I’ll do my best to remember what Mark Twain had to say about fear.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.

Got to run, the next part of this adventure is calling my name.

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