Nov 5, 2009

Painful and Awkward Realizations

I once considered myself a would-be professional musician. I invested a good deal of time and energy into it, put myself out there in bands, solo work, studio sessions, live shows, radio shows.... etc. Have reels of studio recordings, demo recordings and a CD to show for it.

In the end - when life showed me the brutally explicit future my life as such held in store, I chose to step off that path.

Life without a creative outlet was as close to spiritual death as I could have imagined, but I rediscovered the joy of writing - of telling stories, crafting modern re-envisionings of mythologies ancient and contemporary. I'm in the middle of a second of three novels, YA SciFi/Fantasy genre, and I only just now forced myself - or allowed life to force me, more accurately - to see a brutal truth.

These books are not the books I have yet to NEED to write. These are fun books, stories, fantasies and pretends. But there are tales that are more primal to my consciousness, and I'm nowhere near ready to expose those deeper thoughts. The truer fears and founding principles that power me - or restrain me - still exist well out of reach from the fictional yarns I'm weaving.

The question I must ask myself, however, is this:

Can I survive as an author if I do not confront these darkest daemons from my core? Or will they one day claw their way unbidden to my surface? This is not the moment I expected to ask these questions. But, then, does any one of us make an appointment with their inner demons, in an effort to seek a confrontation of convenience?

The rest of this book should prove interesting.

1 comment:

Snuggles said...

I was just browsing through blogs and casually commenting my thoughts, but your blog in particular really spoke to me.

I'm still just a kid coming into the adult world so I'm just beginning to figure out what to do with myself. I love art with a passion, it's just so much fun, but lately I've been putting it off so I can really focus on other things like school and work. Then I felt like I was losing touch with that artistic side of me, and it hurts to see it go. SO I decided to try making music for a change, kind of like how you're doing writing now.