There was this book I started writing in college. It started as a quick and dirty romance novel—just something to sell and make some cash. I didn’t even plan to send it out in my own name. Only the characters wouldn’t cooperate. They simply refused to ACT the way trashy romance-novel characters act. And yet, despite such a blatant disregard for my authority as a writer, they also refused to leave me alone. They bugged me. They haunted my dreams. They would not go quietly and simply let me live my life in peace. So what’s a writer to do? I kept writing the damned thing. Working on it, agonizing over it. Setting it down, word by painful word. I had a mentor while at the university, who I asked to read part of it, thinking he would tell me it was worthless crap and I should burn it at the earliest opportunity, thus giving me an escape. The man was, after all, a successful professional before coming to the university; he would tell me the truth. Only he liked the damned thing; thought it was worth writing. So I kept at it; writing, revising, reworking.
And then I realized I didn’t know how to write it. I knew how it began. I knew how it ended. I didn’t know how to get from point A to point B. It was too difficult. I was too close, too young. So I boxed it up—all the endless versions of this vexing story. I thought sometime along the way I would probably pass over a convenient bridge and dump it in, to drift off to a water-logged oblivion.
But I could not let it go. Through numerous moves, over years, decades, I carried those pages with me. I could not get rid of them. Why? Because Bob had thought it was worth something and I trusted him? Because I had invested too much of myself to let it go?
I had almost forgotten it; it was a relic of the past. Only lately the past has been haunting my dreams again. The past has been coming back to me at odd times in the day, stirring my mind and my memories. Stirring my passion. And I have realized that maybe, just maybe, I could actually finish it now. Having more perspective, more experience, more maturity, perhaps I am finally ready to take it on and give it the life it needs.
I have just bought an iBook laptop. Used, but in great shape. And I plan to carry it with me for those ideas and paragraphs that shape themself in my head. Those elusive weavings of words that seem to spring full-blown in my mind, but disappear as quickly as they come. Only now, I will have my laptop and they will only disappear onto my hard drive instead of into oblivion. I even have a new title and a new resolve that finally I can lay these ghosts to rest and be done with it.
