One of the perks of posting over ten years of your fiction and poetry is that you get to read it again. While I didn't change anything from its original form, I reread each piece for any glaring typos etc., and then dumped it onto the blog to let the readers take it or leave it. But it's been nice (mostly) to revisit these old pieces.
Several of the old stories found their way into my novels without my recollection. Linda--the woman in "The Things We Wish For"--is a precursor to Betty Bluefeet, the wife of my protagonist in my first novel "The Anguish of Angus Bluefeet." And the unnamed protagonist of that same story ("The Things We Wish For") has the same experience of running through the house wondering if his beloved has taken their own life. There are several descriptive sentences which seem duplicated almost verbatim. To my knowledge, (it HAS been ten years or so) I never lifted pieces of this story for my novel. It just happened.
I'm a firm believer in the idea that we write what we are ready to write at a particular time...and not a moment before. And everything we write today allows us to write what we are going to write tomorrow. That's why--even while I have pieces that will never see the light of day--nothing is a wasted effort. Everything I write always serves me down the line. What I write today makes me the writer I am tomorrow.
Which takes me back to the idea of William Stafford's "writing as vocation." I'll tackle THAT one at another time. ;)
Many of my thoughts as they relate to "Writing Practice" were inspired directly and indirectly by Natalie Goldberg's "Writing Down the Bones."
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