Another one down, another one down,

Another one bites the dust? Well, I hope not. I have finished my latest packet entry to my advisor and sent it off in a cascading stream of binary code across the country, irretrievable. I'm excited about the exchange this month. For one, I actually got to include some fiction writing in my packet this time around. Instead of the sole focus being the essay, I turned in a seventeen page story that I think works in this early version of the draft. Don't get me wrong, there is work to be done, but I think the story is revealing itself to me.

I wrote a couple of half-life pages last night after sending off my packet and then I decided that it was time for a nice little break and so I went to the movie store and went home to my wife. Sitting on the couch, I began to have the feeling of accomplishment, of having made it this far, of meeting the challenge I have set out for myself. Not completing it, mind you, but meeting it.

So, as I sat in the living room, feet propped on the ottoman, my dog eyeballing me as if curious as to why I was home so early on a Monday night, and my wife cuddled up under a fleece and down blanket, I began to realize something about this whole process, about the writing life, about myself.

I am a writer. I have to be. I have written for as long as I can remember and I want to write for as long as I can foresee. Nothing makes me happier than feeling like I have tuned a phrase so that it sings, not just for the music of the language, but for its placement, its perfect implication within a greater story, for its inherent truth. In many ways, words are the only way I know how to find truth in this world. I don't think there is a lot of it going around these days but I know it is out there. I know there are things in this life, as a human, as a culture, that are true and some of them are beautiful and some of them are terrible but they are there. I want to dedicate my life to finding and expressing at least one of those truths. I want to dedicate myself to the searching, the asking, the silently necessary task of making sense of this brief time we get to spend here on the physical plane. I believe I'm beginning to live my wish.