Once upon a time when I was much younger, with much longer hair, living as a child of the 60's/70's, I wrote a story. Actually it was the draft of a book. It was a fantasy book that reflected a lot of things I was experiencing at that point in life. I took it a long way. I had some artwork done for it. I actually submitted some briefs to publishers. But I didn't really pursue it. I had three children and I needed all my energy to just deal with growing up to being a real husband, father, and career person.
But I never threw the book away. The manuscripts and the maps were carefully saved through all our moves over the years. I remember about a decade or so a go, taking it out and reading it and feeling a bit horrified at some of the things that were key features of the book. And yet there were other parts that I thought were really pretty good. At that time I couldn't see any way of reconciling who I was today and my values now with what I had written before.
Fast forward to December of last year. I'm now the transition/retired person and I'm taking on new and different challenges and interests. I had also been rereading a bunch of science fiction and fantasy from the 70's that I have in my library. I was kind of taken with the fact that a lot of these books I loved then really weren't that well written. So I decided to get out my story and read it again.
After that rereading, I felt that it really had a lot of good character development and plot development. And I found that maybe the values it promoted really wasn't so far off of what I was feeling especially after all my realizations related to transition and retirement.
I've decided that I'm going to rewrite the book. As it is only in a typed paper version, this has meant I have to key the whole thing into the computer. I'm not quite half way there as it is around 220 pages. This is a good process, as it is giving me lots of ideas of how it needs to be altered, added to, changed to make a tighter more solid story. And since my latest revelation about my the demon of 'proving something to somebody', I realized that I don't really care if anyone ever sees this or not. It seems to be something that I'm motivated to do simply for the joy of doing it. It's such an unusual, unique and joyful experience to me.
3 comments:
Oh, Dad, that is so great! So many wonderful childhood memories. I can't wait to read the final product!
That seems the best reason to do anything - for the pure joy of it. Not for money or recognition - but simply because it fulfills you. Although, it seems to happen that when you do something for the right reasons, the unexpected benefit is that it provides you with something good in return! Who knows? Maybe you'll end up on a best seller list in the near future!
Yeah! I'm excited to see how it is going in April
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