As I was writing this on the long journey home from Greece yesterday, I realized that although my travel stories are somewhat personal, I don’t write many personal things beyond travel on this blog. Writing this was an attempt to clear my head and get back on track.
Ever since I was a little kid in school, I loved writing. I used to write story after story about my dogs, or dogs in general. At the time my parents assumed it was an excuse for me to draw pictures of dogs, which was my other passion. I never had an issue with creative writing assignments in elementary school. Although I don’t remember much about learning to read, I also don’t remember having a great deal of difficulty beyond getting so ahead of myself trying to see what would happen next that I would skip words and lines in an attempt to get the story moving faster. I used to get perfect scores on all of my spelling tests, and once as a 3rd grader, even slipped in a word from the 4th grade test by accident (we has split classes in a lot of elementary schools). However, I have to be honest in saying that growing up I never wanted to be a writer. I had bigger dreams; I wanted to sing and act. In high school I was a bit more practical and considered something like Psychology and in Uni moved onto Marketing. It’s safe to say that writing just kind of fell into my lap.
One day when we were still at Uni, I was spending a night with some of my friends at one of their parent’s house. My friend Katie’s dad lived on Lake Sammamish in Washington and we used to love to go there and hang out, get out of our sorority and feel like we were back at home. One morning we were upstairs chatting with her stepmom and she was sharing some of her insight into our lives. A firm believer in human lives being written in the stars; Katie’s stepmom told us a thing or two about what we might expect to see in our futures. Most of the things she said I brushed to the side, some seemed plausible and others were just mere observations. One thing she said stuck with me. She told me that one day I would write a book; that it would be one of my avenues to success. At the time I laughed a little bit, as I wasn’t a writer, I was studying Marketing and I couldn’t even consistently write in a journal.
Creative Commons credit: sterlic
About a year later, I was sitting on a lounge chair on a deserted beach in the middle of a fall night in Fiji. Beer in hand, my good friend Nell and I were talking about life. Discussing the kinds of things that friends talk about when they have reached a turning point in their lives and their intellects are fueled by alcohol. Out of nowhere, Nell turned to me and said:
One day you’re going to write a book about your life, Annie.
I’m sure my jaw-dropped.
I hadn’t heard mention of a book in at least a year. What? Had I told him what Margaret had said?
At the time, I laughed again. What would I ever write about my tiny life that anyone could possibly want to read? But Nell believed in me.
I still haven’t discovered what part of my life anyone else could possibly find of interest, but I’m working on it.
As I think (hope) is the case with anyone, my inspiration and my enthusiasm for writing wavers as it does for anything else in life. When it’s down, I’m kicking myself, thinking I’m letting my readers down. The reality is that I am probably letting down no one but myself, however, my writing career is growing slowly and it needs all the nurturing it can get.
Lately, I’ve been on a down (as you may have noticed from my lack of posts in the last weeks), but as things are changing and my next month will be full of booking tickets, organizing insurance, travel plans, hostels and meet-ups. Then it will be time again to focus on a job search but I don’t want to get ahead of myself just yet.
I have a lot of stories left that I haven’t told from Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy and many that are coming up to tell so there will definitely be plenty of inspiration, I just need to regenerate my own writing juices.
