Creative Juice

It was while drinking a glass of orange juice one morning that I had a burst of creativity. In just a few minutes, as the sweet citrus danced on my taste buds en route to my stomach via my throat, I came up with three ideas. This post is one of them.

The idea for my most recently published short story, Goyyou, came to me in a dream. Another time, I was standing at a urinal in a public toilet in Greta when the idea for a story about a small group of insects meeting in a awkward social situation struck me. It became the story, A Place of Refuge which was published by Countdown: School Magazine.

Virtually no one reads Square Pegs so I feel there is no harm in blowing my own trumpet. However, that's not what I'm trying to do. Here's my point: I have lots of ideas. I'm always coming up with interesting characters and plots and weird situations. I've written over 60 short stories and I have plenty more to come. I'm a creative person. God made me creative.I love to write and I feel exhilarated by the process of writing. When I write a story, I feel "right". It is one of my escapes. One of my pressure release valves. Writing helps me maintain my sanity. I have to write.

To paraphrase a quote I read a long time ago, "why wouldn't God, having made me this way, not provide opportunities for me to use my talent to bless others and glorify Him?"

It seems as logical to me as orange juice and toast for breakfast. I have a way with words. I'm not Shakespeare but I can write and I love it, so why shouldn't I pursue it? The answer is, that I am, but it can be awfully frustrating. Writers want readers but I have so few that if my readers were books they wouldn't even occupy one shelf in a small library. For thirteen years I have been working on my craft; writing stories, using valuable writing time to research markets and fiddle with the formatting to satisfy various submission criteria. Submitting stories, waiting sometimes for months, sometimes literally forever, and then having those stories rejected, frequently. Finding time to write more stories and repeating the whole process. It can be terribly disheartening but what can I do? It is no overstatement to say that I was born to write. I love writing. I am a writer so I'll just keep writing.

And so ends my self indulgent post for this week. To my army of readers...