As I prepare to write at 6:30 a.m (after a 4 a.m. workout), I'm making a hot cup of tea and thinking back to when I was a little girl, ten years old and typing away at my Sci-Fi/Fantasy masterpiece "Angela Queen of the Angels" on an Underwood typewriter my mother saved up and bought me. (The fact that I said "typewriter" really dates me. Ya'll remember having to string that bad boy up when it ran out of ink? The blue or black smudges all over your hand? White out? Or the advanced white out attached to the ink ribbon? Holla!)I had always written little stories, my first being a horror story about a murderous black cat in 4th grade. But I can see myself back then, long brown pony tails rubbing against my back, copper colored fingers feverishly flying across the keys, late at night, my mother calling to me, telling me to go to bed (and me being sooo clever thinking that if I pecked the keys slower, she couldn't hear me)I was in the ZONE, that place where a writer goes when you forget that you are writing, that you are indeed an organic element in your own story, living it in real time, hours passing. I used to find myself coming out of a trance-like state when I was spent from making up a world. Literally, I would stop, and take several seconds to realize where I was and how much time had passed. It was in those twilight times in grade school when I realized that I was a writer and would never be able to do anything else. Sometimes, when I feel down about my writing, when the rejection slips pile up, or a plot element is losing me, I hold onto that image of myself at ten, when the magic was in the words, not whether I sold anything.Do you remember your first time? The moment when you heard your calling and answered?
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