once upon a time

This is the final week of the writing class I've been taking for the past month or so. I got a bit off track last week, something I'm blaming on wedding-weekend recovery but really it was just because I was tired and a bit sick and I gave myself some time to just...be. (See also: I'm lazy.)

The class provides prompts each day and, though I haven't done all of them yet, it's comforting to know they're there when I need them. Because, you see, the point of this class was not to write a masterpiece in five weeks, but to get into a habit of writing every day. And I'm almost there. I don't know if anyone has noticed (or, you know, cared), but I've been posting here more often, and between that and working on the writing class prompts, I believe I've written something almost every day WHICH IS CRAZY. I don't remember the last time I did that.

I've always loved writing and telling stories, from the time I learned how to write more than a sentence, but somewhere between The Evil Summer and now, I turned it into a chore. And that's ridiculous because I actually really love to write! But I stopped doing it because I felt like I HAD to. WHICH IS ALSO RIDICULOUS. No one is holding a gun to my head. Where was all this pressure coming from? Oh, right, from myself, because I kept coming up with new projects and blogs and I started like five novels but never finished any of them, which all obviously means that I SUCK AND AM TERRIBLE AND DON'T EVEN DESERVE TO HAVE THESE TYPING FINGERS.

Anyway. One good thing about this class is that it's reminded me how much fun writing can be. It's probably the most fun I've had writing since the 4th grade, when our teacher gave us free time to not only write stories, but to illustrate them and make actual books out of them. I found one of these books a few months ago, when I took home an old scrapbook of mine from my parents' house.

It's called Benny the Bored Bunny and, though I didn't remember the story I'd written until I recently reread it, I remember the act of making it. Sitting quietly at my desk in Mrs. Castrejon's class, my head resting on my arm as I wrote the story, taking my story into the small room that served as the book-making factory, painstakingly putting the book together, and holding it proudly in my hands once it was finished.

Alliteration is fun!

I remember how excited I was to show it to my parents, as if I'd written and published a New York Times bestseller, not that I knew what the New York Times was at that point but shut up this is my story. And, really, that's how you should feel after you write something. After you've put that much work into it, you should want to show it to everyone, until they get sick of it and tell you to go away and find something else to do OMG WHY DON'T YOU EVER GO OUTSIDE.

Ahem.

So, once I finish this writing class, my goal isn't to immediately write some bestseller. I mean, OBVIOUSLY, right? Instead, it's to write something I'm proud of. Something I've worked hard on. Something I'm excited to show to anyone who might be paying attention. That's all, really, and right now it seems like just enough.