the_wanlorn | This is why I'm a writer.

It's all in how you look at it.
So, there's sludge outside of MassAcademy; black, goopy, viscous sludge oozing up from underneath the pavement. It was there yesterday. I thought it was just a puddle, but the mounds of parking lot poking up through it looked kind of sketchy, so I nudged one with my toe.

And it wasn't ground at all.

It was all marshy. Just in case it was some prehistoric liquid-y beast that was brought back to life by one of the junior's science fair experiments, I ran away from it before it could schlorp up my leg and eat me. Or before it could schlorp up my leg and assimilate and turn me into a sludge-covered-zombie-monster-thing so that it could use me to spread it around the city and it could take over the world.

Then there was an email this morning that warned all of us to stay out of the sludge because they didn't want it tracked into MassAcademy. So, I got to school to check in. Since I was late, I parked right next to the sludge pool so I could just drive through the cobblestone-section to get back to Grove St. When I got out of the car, I realized that it had grown and it was huge!!! My first thought was, "...that pool of sludge is bigger... oh shit, did it eat a couple of the juniors??"

Even though they're only juniors, that would have been quite unfortunate. It would mean there was man-eating slime inhabiting Worcester! Someone would have to destroy it and, with my luck, that job would fall to me. So I would heroically battle the Evil Sludge Monster and be mortally wounded by its Sludgy Might. Then, after I killed it, I would gasp something insightful or romantic to my sidekick and expire from my wounds, only to miraculously become alive again in time to defeat the return of the Evil Sludge Monster.

Anyway. Then I saw black footprints, huge black footprints going down through the courtyard and into MassAcademy. I didn't want to go check in anymore when I noticed that. What if it was the Creature from the Black Lagoon's cousin, the Creature from the Black Sludge Pit and it had taken over MassAcademy and eaten everyone in there and grown to the size of a house and was lying in wait for all the seniors to check in so it could pounce on them and eat them too?!

Of course, then I realized that certain idiot adults (who should never have been hired for a second year) probably had really big shoes. And that he would've stepped in the sludge and tracked it into the Academy, so, unless he was a sludge-monster, I was safe.

But I still snuck up to the door all Mission-Impossible style justincase.

Then I had to drive my car through a bit of the sludge to get out through the cobblestone-covered section. I swear, it tried to suck me back in!! I revved the engine and escaped, though, scaring the living daylights out of the dude standing in the doorway of the building across the cobblestones from MassAcademy.

At least, I think it was a dude… It could've been the sludge monster, oozing up into humanoid form, glaring evilly at me escaping from its clutches, and then cackling madly as it planned how it would capture me tomorrow morning...

This is why I'm a writer. Because I let my imagination run away with me, because I live in the three-thousand ring circus of my mind, because I look at an empty Coke bottle lying in a pool of sunlight and make up a story about how it got there.

I'm a writer because the real world is a boring place, but my imagination can make it more exciting for you and me.

At the beginning of the year, I was afraid that doing my SISP on writing would kill my joy of it. Doing anything for school tends to do that for me; I guess it's that perverse streak that refuses to do anything others tell me I have to.

But no. It's survived and made my love for writing grow. Of course I hate it, too. You can't not hate something as maddening and frustrating as writing.

I utterly failed at my SISP. My expectations for myself and my assumptions of what I was capable of doing in this set time frame were horribly off, too high by a long shot. However, it's taught me a lot about what I can and can't do. I can't write for a living. I don't have the drive, the patience, or the "stick-with-it" attitude for that. When the going gets tough, I give up for a while instead of pushing through like I would have to in order to survive of writing. But I now know for certain that I can create a storyline people will like. I can plot a long storyline from beginning to end in my head. I can commit it to paper, I can survive months of Writer's Block, I can write like a mofo when I want to.

For a project that I had so many reservations about in the beginning of the year, I haven't regretted a moment of it.

Children of Darkness and Light will eventually be finished. Not this year, probably not even next year, but it's getting there. The major portions are close to being written out. The connecting pieces are forming in my mind. The obscene amount of writing that's possibly too rudimentary to be considered a first draft is close to being done. A year or so to edit it, polish it, and it should be ready to convince someone to publish it. It's going to get done. :-)

This is why I'm a writer.

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