Passion

Sharon Wildwind

Writing forces a passion, squeezes out a life of its own. It has to because the externals—money, fame, maybe even good common sense—are often not there. I’ve lost count of the number of books in which the author ends the acknowledgments by thanking her family for putting up with dirty laundry, too many pizza take-outs, and weeks of being somewhere else a.k.a. lost in an imaginary world.

Writers who are fortunate live in families who somehow comprehend that wandering through the house at 1:00 in the morning, asking if anyone still awake how to spell marmalade ; that stabbing a raw chicken with a stiletto to see how much pressure it takes to puncture the skin to a perfectly normal act, and don’t fret too much about where found a stiletto in the first place. They become accustomed to imaginary characters at dinner, as long as those characters don’t insist on recounting detail-by-detail autopsies between the soup and the main course.

Sorry for abruptly ending here. My computer is having a major meltdown and I’ve managed to recover only bits of the blog I was posting. More next time, I promise. Go read a book, preferably a mystery.

(LATER) My computer indeed did have a major meltdown. It's now a dark, cold lump on my desk, though my teckie guy thinks he can save the hard drive, which is, apparently, a little like doing a brain transplant. In any case, I'm off-line for approximately two weeks. I'll still be able to post my blog next week, using a friend's computer, but not check my e-mail. I should be up and running by July 15.

---------
Writing quote for the week:
It takes great passion and great energy to do anything creative...You have to care so much that you can't sleep, you can't eat, you can't talk to people. It's just got to be right. You can't do it without that passion. ~Agnes DeMille, actress