Before Cheruby went away, I bought him a present - The Writer's Toolbox. It has some gidgets and gadgets to help writers come up with things to write about. As we were exploring his new toy, he told me that he wanted to read more of my writing. That's a bit intimidating, but I'm game. It was the first thing I wanted to be when I grew up - a writer.

I was a voracious reader as a child. I used to sit hunched over with my night light shining over my shoulder onto the page when I was supposed to be sleeping. I made a fort in the bottom of my closet so that I didn't have to hunch in front of the night light anymore. I only got caught a few times, but certainly not enough to discourage me from doing it. Sometimes, I'd even go back to it the same night just after I'd been caught and told to go to sleep.

Those two ideas, writing and reading, come in a package for me. It was from my love of reading (which I still have, I just have a lot of other obligations that keep from doing just what I want - stupid needing to live and have money and be clean) that came my desire to be a writer. Then I tried it once in grade 7 and wasn't very good at it so I didn't really bother trying again after that. There are a lot of things that come easy to me on the first try and when something came along that I didn't easily pick up, I just chose to go another direction - like bowling. Bowling reasonably well is way easier than writing reasonably well.

In my foray into writing a story for my sweetheart, I realized that once I'd envisioned the ending, which I always thought was my "hard part," I was done writing the story in my head and the effort to get that down on paper, reasonably well, wasn't worth the end product for me. No one would be able to definitively tell me that I'd done a good job. I needed that a lot as a kid. Good marks meant I'd done a good job. A high score in bowling meant I'd done a good job. Someone could read my story and really like it, but someone else might think it was kind of lame. No real way to tell whether my efforts were good or not.

So, I'm going to do my best to finish my story. And read it and edit it and make it pretty and make it into something of which I can be proud. (And with that I'm reminded of the line from Alien: Resurrection, "...I am not the man with whom to fuck.")