In The Beginning

My wife and I’ve been together for ten years now, married for six. We have two children: a daughter who is six, and a son just shy of adding a fourth candle to the cake.  

A few years ago, we took a leap. I left my job and she left hers.  She’d been teaching children for seventeen years and I grew up working in a family business.  Together, we opened a small pre-school.  The best way, we reasoned, to spend time as much time with our children as we could during those years that matter most, and seem to be the easiest to miss.  

We bought property that we could use as both our home and business; an old victorian in our city’s downtown historic district. Shortly after opening, we discovered that our city’s parking requirements prohibited expansion and the addition of any more children.

Our business had a ceiling.  

That meant we’d have to start thinking different (the charm of us both teaching children for less than the cost of living was bound to thin once our own were no longer part of the blend).  

Daisy (my wife’s name for the purpose of this blog) has always dreamt of writing, and often urged me to enlist in her fantasy.  She’s always thought I had too much to say, and often believed my thoughts might be best expressed with my fingers rather than my tongue.

But as I had for every one of the ten years we’d been together, I ignored her suggestion.

Writing, for me, has always been a spectator sport.  I love to read, and have ever since I could stare at the pages and string the sounds together. I spent a good part of childhood with my nose between the pages, but I’ve loved movies with an unhealthy appetite for just as long, and yet I’m fairly far from imagining myself running through the streets with a camera slung over my shoulder, shouting “ACTION!”

Our lives changed forever last September, when from nowhere, Daisy shot me a look I’ll never forget and said, “Really, Honey, when are gonna just start writing?”

So I did.  

It was just after Labor Day, our daughter had started Kindergarten, and the winds of change had effectively swept into our lives, leaving plenty of emotional dust to settle like silt over our slightly more silent afternoons.  Across the next four months, I gathered whatever scraps of time I could find (mostly dredged up by Daisy), and drained my brain onto the glossy screen in front of me.

On the last day of last year, our printer groused and grumbled as it spit out my first manuscript; a five-hundred page sloppy copy that sent shivers down my spine and actually made my knees knobby.

I was under no illusions.  The book was beyond terrible and I knew it.  It needed more work than our hundred and ten year old Victorian (which I swear has had at least a hundred and eleven owners). The entire thing was a messy, jumbled, vomit of awkward similes and too many adverbs; a verbal explosion with little direction to guide the riot of ideas, suffocating inside too scant a space.

But I was writing.

I was pretty high on the revelation.  Even if the novel’s only scheduled stop was some forgotten folder, buried in the depths of my hard drive, I’d written something longer than a love note, and in the process, found something that felt innate, that I could do a little of everyday, continuously developing my skill as it drifted from from hobby to trade.

As usual, when I finally relented to one of Daisy’s suggestions, I ended up wondering what had taken me so long.  

By January, I needed a break from the novel, but I didn’t want to stop writing, so I started drafting simple stories for our children, as well as the wee students at our school.  These stories were a fast and fun diversion.  Totally different from what I’d done with the novel, but every bit as satisfying.   

In February, I returned to the novel while continuing to diddle with the children’s material. Now it’s June and I’m starting the third draft of the novel.  It’s already grown into something far from its cradle, but I’m also starting to see the potential of where it can go. Daisy and I have also gathered a portfolio of children’s material; a magical brew of her twenty years with children, my love of words, and the endless inspiration of our own offspring.

If I’m a writer, then I need to write. This blog will be an excercise for my craft, as well as steady documentation of the process as we seek representation and live through the process of getting our work into the proper hands. We have a lot on our plate right now, so posting will be infrequent for the first two months.  By the first of August, posts will increase to five times a week. I promise.

Writer Dad