Writing

(My absence last week was due to a vacation I took with the kids, my sister, my niece, and my grandmother.  Details to come once I have the photos to include.)

I got word last week just before leaving on vacation that I would once again have an essay published in a book!  Last time it was a small excerpt; this time its the whole essay.  I'm not sure yet what the format is, as I noticed there are only eleven essays to be included.  Nevertheless, I'm excited.

Yesterday I got word that a short film for which I wrote the script has garnered some interest from an investor that wants to move ahead with 4-5 more short films to package together.  I was contacted by the producer in hopes that I'll be on board again.  These projects also mean assistant directing again, which is probably one of my most favourite roles in filmmaking.

I've always loved writing.  I still have a huge box in the basement of things I've written over the years, going back to my elementary school days.  I always wanted to write something bigger, something to submit to publishers, something to find its way to the printed page.  I always thought that would happen once I sat myself down in front of a computer and simply banged out my masterpiece one word at a time.  I've had hundreds of ideas pass through my mind, a countless beginnings of stories that floundered and were abandoned not long after their genesis.

Now, instead of a big bang, there seems to be a slow creation process instead.  A blog to gather ideas, a few blog entries submitted to a website, a couple of essays published online, a produced script, a printed excerpt, a printed essay... I look around at these new beginnings and smile with a little excitement.  Maybe, one day, I will look back at this time and pinpoint it as the true start of a writing career.

I still have those couple of really big projects I want to get to, but not yet.  Those will be reserved for days down the road when my children are more independent and need less of my constant attention.  Funny enough, I no longer feel a sense of urgency to get something done right now.  Now, there is a feeling of a peaceful journey, an idea that I'm walking down a path I am meant to walk, and there is no need to run.  All things in their time and season.  Accomplishments need not be all finished in my early years.  A book written when I am 25 or 35 or 55 years old is still a book written from that which is in me.

And so I write.  Likening the experience to birthing a baby (an often used simile), while the experience is usually painful if it is to be honest and true and if it is to reach others, it cannot be forced too early from the womb.  There is a set time of gestation, and when it is ready, it will emerge into the world at exactly the time it was meant to.