draining the reservoir.

For my birthday, Mark, and many members of my family and a few dear friends threw some money into a pot to send me away on a writing trip. When he presented me with this sum, along with the freedom to choose where and when I would take this retreat, I felt two things primarily: gratitude and fear. The gratitude is obvious. The fear comes from the bottom of my gut, the place from which all of my fears are born, and that is a reservoir of insecurity. What if I don't write anything worthwhile? What if I have writer's block the entire time? What if I never sell a book, and am therefore never actualized in my craft by the public, and therefore spend thousands of hours working on something that never earns a penny when I could have had a full-time job making a steady income with benefits and a 401K, and everyone that knows me and loves me thinks I am a big, fat failure?

Sounds pretty beat up to me when I write it down. Perhaps this is the therapy of writing. I articulated some of this sentiment to my sister that afternoon, and she laughed and shook her pretty head, and assured me that everyone who gave money to the writing trip gave because I love to write, and they wanted to provide me with the joy of four un-interrupted days doing the thing that I enjoy most on the earth. There is no choking collar of expectation that I need to wear, and in fact, it would do everyone a great disservice to know that I was wearing a collar on the trip at all. Phew. After that conversation, the fear magically evaporated, and was replaced by anticipation.

The next day I booked 4 days and 3 nights at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina in October. The thought of four days with Dora and my own big bed with a box spring that does not groan and screech whenever anyone moves slightly, and a view of the North Carolina mountains in October as they are molting from summer clothes to winter, is thrilling.

To explain further, the idea of a writing trip came about a few months ago during an exasperated conversation with Mark. It was probably close to eight o'clock and I was cooking dinner, waving my chopping knife around, explaining the frustrations of writing: The loneliness. The ebb and flow of thinking the project is excellent, and the next day wretched, and never really knowing. The time it takes to get from one page to another. The frustration when someone asks how it's going, which is a perfectly valid question, but never knowing what the hell to say. The only living being who doesn't ask is Sidney, and it is because she does not care about what I'm doing, only that she gets to snooze beside my desk, and there is great comfort in that. But anyway, then we got to the frustration of interruptions. That took us down a whole separate rabbit trail, and I was griping about being distracted and came to this hollering rant about how I NEED TO JUST GET AWAY, TO SOME REMOTE PLACE WHERE NO ONE KNOWS ME, AND BE THAT CRAZY PERSON WHO IS JUST BY HERSELF, WRITING A BOOK.

If you know anything about Mark, you know he is the best at giving thoughtful, planned gifts. (If you don't know him, believe me, he is the most worth knowing person I have ever met, and maybe if you get to know him well enough, you'll get in on the gift thing). Low and behold, he decided right then and there, as I brandished the blade within five inches of his face, to make the writing trip happen.


And now I can't wait.


And here is something that I'm working on figuring out in the meantime: contentment in the fact that there is only one thing that defines me, and that's the fact that I have Jesus; I'm his, and He is mine. Whether or not I write does not ultimately matter, though I do believe that writing stories is my calling. I'm betting that most of the writing process, with is really just a long course of refinement, like life, is because it's how He is making me different and more like him all the time. I'm working on a short story right now with such a bad case of writer's block it gives me a headache every day around five, and I keep waiting for the Muse to return, my lucky Irishman, but I am trying to simply enjoy it. After all, the real fun of writing is wrestling with the sentences, the paragraphs, the dialogues, filling them with words that are occasionally and miraculously perfect. It is the fun of creating a story, the beginning, the drama, the end. The characters, how they change and get better - I guess it is all very circular.