The Big Tickle

I've given everyone a look into the many journals of my past to illustrate my hankering for the written word. I don't write in my journals daily anymore but I do keep a regular journal. Sometimes I speak my journal entry to the closest person to me and then I go back and write my thoughts out about it later. Today was one of those days for me. I spoke this journal entry yesterday and then wrote it down this morning:

April 28, 2010
My days all blur together now. There isn't a start to my days unless I go all the way back to the beginning.

I wake up in the morning with ideas in my head that are so big and so detailed that I have to find a piece of paper to write my thoughts out onto, but I know I can't start writing or I won't be able to stop. So I hold back the plethora of words waiting to spill out onto a page and I focus instead on waking the kids and helping them dress for school.

After I get downstairs, I can feel my breathing change as I hold onto my thoughts while the kids eat breakfast. I'm starting to get anxious and I hope that a single idea isn't lost while I pack their lunches and ensure each child has what they need for school. I'm using every ounce of my energy to balance the conversation in the car with the thoughts in my head as I drop my daughter off at school. As soon as the door closes and I know my daughter is safe inside the confines of the school, I start to feel my ideas swelling inside my head almost to the point of distraction, but I drive on to get the boys to preschool. After I get back into the car from dropping the boys off, I have a twenty minute drive home before I can get to my computer, or to a notepad in the event I cannot wait for the computer to start up. I spend this time playing out my ideas like a movie in my head.

Once I'm home and I'm confronted with the computer, I experience a giant release as words spill onto the blank spaces of the inviting software meant solely for this purpose. At 87 words per minute, my fingers don't let off the keyboard for the first hour, and even then I only slow down and have to pull myself away when my lunchtime hunger pains set in.

It wasn't until January of this year that I knew my thoughts were bigger than I could relay in a poem or write out in a short story. When I opened my journal January 9, 2010 it was as I suspected: my journal couldn't possibly accommodate these new thoughts and ideas that my brain was producing. I needed to write a book. Not because I have always wanted to, or because I always said I would one day, I needed to write this story before my thoughts overwhelmed my brain. What I didn't realize until I started outlining these new thoughts, was that my story couldn't possibly fit into one book or even two books; I needed to write a trilogy.

So, I wake every day with this incredible urge to write my story down. I never feel like I have to write, or that I should take a break and walk away for a minute; I just write. I spend four hours during the day while the kids are at school and up to three hours at night after everyone's in bed and then my characters take over my dreams while I sleep.

I've been going about this routine and experiencing this daily urge to write my story for fifteen weeks now. And so, with two completed books under my belt, I've officially written my way into a whole new world. My journey starts here with one story but is propelled by the variety of stories I feel creeping up on me every day.