Manic Monday #2: Drifting

I forgot to check out what the word for this Monday was until late Saturday night. Drifting...hmmmm. A few ideas come to mind but my mind thinks of one right away, but I push it away, think of something else I say to it. I think of ideas for a story, some reason the word drifting feels like it could be used for a story.

But the one idea I had for the word keeps coming back to me so I figured I would use it. It means looking at a part of my life I would rather just pretend was going great.

Drifting

Sometimes I feel like my life has been drifting with no real purpose for, well, I don't know how many years, maybe forever in some sense. This is kind of hard to explain. I'm not depressed, I don't feel like I have a bad life...it's just not the life I thought I would have.

From the earliest age I can remember I have been in love with the written word. Anything that I could read I did. One of my proudest achievments at school was when they tested us for reading comprehension and when I was in the sixth grade I was reading college level. So of course with this love of books I would want to turn that into a career. All I've ever really wanted to do was write.

I've tried. I would write stories every week, sometimes everyday. I bought Writer's Digest and all the other magazines and books that promised to help turn you into a selling writer. I would send the stories out to collect rejection letters. But it never really stopped me, I kept at it. I would have half a dozen stories out there making the rounds. As soon as a story came back I would stick it in an envelope and send it off to another magazine.

Of course at this time writing was definitely not going to provide a living for me. So I found a job. I started as a stock boy for a company called HJ Wilsons. Later Wilsons was bought out by Service Merchandise and that was where I spent the majority of my career until they went bankrupt. I'm currently working at another retailer, I don't like to use its name, just to keep it safe.

Over the years I found myself drifting away from my writing and more into the other side of my work life, retail. It was easy to drift away from the hours spent at the computer, the days when I had to say no to going out with friends because I wanted to stay home and try to finish up that new story or comic book script.

I can't look back and put my finger on any special occurence or event that triggered this drifting. It just happened. I found it easier to work a seventy hour week at work than I did to sit behind the computer screen and try to come up with a new story.

I still thought of ideas and stories. My mind would play them out daily or when I laid down to sleep. But the next day it was easier to drift away from the actual working of the story idea and go to work and do whatever was needed there.

I'm not saying that I should have ignored my work at Service to concentrate on my writing. Most writers in this country do not make a living from their work and have to have some type of other income to help pay for their writing. I've always understood this and figured that was ok. And for a long time I was able to focus on the two. I would come home from work and go straight to my computer and start work.

I've even had a small amount of success. In the early ninties I was selling some of my scripts to numerous comic book companies. There were even a few of these smaller companies that were looking at me to produce more material for them. Than the bust came and most of these companies went out of business.

And yet I found myself drifting away from writing. The last decade I have written very little. I start something and than stop. I try to find artists to work with and than never follow though. It was never one event, one thing that triggered this lessening of my writing, it was a slow and steady drift away from it.

I don't like to admit it. I keep telling myself that I am going to jump right back into the writing. And I have made some progress back that way, just not enough. That was the intital reason I started this blog, I wanted to have a place to write everyday, hoping that would get me back into the practice of sitting down and writing again. I wanted to blog about my writing, thinking maybe that would get me motivated enough to do it again. It's worked to an extent.

I think it would be easier to get back to the writing if there had been some big problem that caused me to move away from it. Than I could focus on whatever it was and work my way through it. But this gradual drifting away has made it harder, it's ingrained my life like it is now more, slowly taken the years I worked everyday on my writing and turned it into other pursuits.

Even today after working in retail for close to thiry years, having managed a store and currently a manager I don't feel like retail is my real work. I still look at this as a side job to the real one, which is writing.

So I need to take this drifting and turn it around. If I want to get back into writing I can't drift back that way. I have to struggle against the current of apathy I've created and make myself write again. If I try to drift back that way it's not going to work.

I want to stop this drifting. I want to get back to my writing. But there's only one person that can make that happen. And it's me.