running with paper

Years ago I started cutting comics out of the paper I liked. One in particular that I enjoyed was a three or four panel affair, the parents reading and relaxing until they hear a noise and start. A young voice floats out of the other room: “It’s only the wind!” Likely Calvin and Hobbes – it seems Bill Watterson’s style of humor.

I’ve been trying to ‘write’ for a long long time; as far back as I recall having the ability to write. The first thing I recall doing was start a book in a nice blank spiral notebook. The book was about a girl whose best friend, Lisa, was moving away.It never got further than the hook. I knew nothing of plot development, character development, or conflict. I didn’t even know it was the hook. Though I told stories (and lies) and wrote my creative and non-creative school work, I didn’t really try writing again much until I had a fifth-grade crush. That didn’t go well either, but it taught me the importance of record keeping – the boy I shared it with took it home, and his father filed it. The boy came back to me a few years later with the story, saying his father had mistakenly kept it as his work.

I immediately destroyed it, embarrassed.

Most of my work has seen the flame or the trash bin; but now I keep it, wishing I could have those bits back, to see where I’ve been and what I’m growing on. But I don’t have them, so I make up for those lost years in quantity by writing – professionally mundane things, journals of life, stories, gardens, and here, writing. I’ve gotten somewhat better by rote practice, almost daily writing and organizing, but I don’t always catch the “spark”.

Some creative types flame. The start and are a house afire. I can do so, but in short bits. So in between times of spark, I write the daily work I’m paid to write, and give myself creative exercises to do. I try to change my style and perspective. I plan it out in my head, then on paper, and often times the first draft and final draft are completely different animals.

Sometimes all the practice comes in handy when a spark comes down the pike and I turn out something others enjoy. Or even better, that I really enjoy. I posted a … I don’t know what to call it. A story, an essay, a picture; a something in my longtime online journal for my friends. I had nurtured it a while and liked the flow of it, and it was received very well. One friend, also an artist in her own right, suggested a venue to publish it, and I took the challenge and plunge. I printed it out, took an editing pencil to it, then worked it up for submission to a magazine I’ve never heard of or read.

It was picked up by a postal worker assigned to empty the box at 2pm yesterday, and now we wait. The dreaded six-month wait between submission and ? Rejection? Acceptance? The last submission I made was well over a decade ago (Writer’s Digest annual writing contest, yes, 47th place, non-rhyming poem, doesn’t count). I’m elated and scared all at once. But I’m glad she pushed me over the ledge.

Here’s a sample, for now:

During the worst of the storm, when the gusts blew harder and wind-tunnel effect of our house placement began to crank up, he started to notice there was Stuff Going On Outside. It was the wind, he told us, we told him. The wind was blowing. And it was raining, too. “Lots of rain,” he exclaimed in the serious surprised manner of a two-year-old just noticing the Big Things Suddenly Going On around him.

Then the keening started. The gusts in the wind tunnel got higher, faster, louder. It started whistling through the eaves, the trees, the horizontal shutters as they flexed and rattled in the wind.

And so we wait.