Traci Ashbe Dark Epic Fantasy Author

Writerly Things…5/29/16

Traci Kenworth

This week is full of graduation activities for my daughter. She will be graduating on this day. This will be her second graduation ceremony. This is her home school. The other is a technical school. She plans to go on to college in the fall. I am both happy and sad about her graduation. Like all mothers, we hate to see our children get ready to go out on their own. We feel they don’t need us anymore but that’s not true. They’ll always need us to be there, to advise, to run an errand for them. My daughter is going into film studies. She wants to be a director. She’s hoping to maybe do something with animation and creative writing. I’m excited to see where she goes with things.

She has inspired me to keep going many times when I wanted to just quit and walk away. Writing is hard. It can be brutal with the hard work and nothing but rejections. Something keeps me coming back, like all those before me. I’m too stubborn to stay away for too long. I love being a storyteller. The characters, the plotting, the journey. So, yes, it is a double-edged sword. It gives me such satisfaction when a story turns out. Even if no eyes but mine and my crit group see it, I must go on. Not because I love to torture myself, but because, I, too, want to see where the story ends, what the characters fates are.

When I type what I see happening in my story, it’s like taking a journey somewhere. You don’t always like some of the passengers, they can be like annoying relatives. Old classmates that bullied you. Or that neighbor who brought you a hummingbird feeder after the death of his wife, so shy, so full of tremors, more afraid than you to reach out. I want to see where my characters lives take them, what happens on the way. Do they find true love? Or just true for the moment? Do they get their wish? Or do they die a horrible death? Each moment I must get down by pen or by the keyboard. If only because I’m a reader too.