Nobody reads this yet I still write.

Currently listening to: Bright Eyes, "Landlocked Blues"

I've been writing lately.

I started writing a short story this past March. Just a little something to relieve some tension from classes and papers and midterms. I honestly didn't think that I would continue it. I didn't really like my story idea. In fact, I had planned on majorly changing it if I kept working on it. Yet I haven't. I simply want to finish it, and recently I've had the idea of writing a second story to go with it. Not necessarily a "sequel," but a short story somehow connected to the first. And then I thought about writing a third that had a connection to the first two but was ultimately its own story as well. And before I knew it, I had an idea of making a small collection of short stories.

I doubt I would ever publish it. I highly doubt I will even complete all the stories that I have now outlined.

But I continue working on it. I love writing. It's like working out a sudoku puzzle. You have an idea for a plot, but within the plot certain elements have to fit together in their own little square. Then, you have to make sure that each square matches up with the other squares. Then the rows have to match up, and the columns have to match up. And only when they do are you done.

So I've been working on this "puzzle" since March. Yesterday, I got my hands on a copy of John Grisham's A Time to Kill and for some reason I decided to read the author's note at the beginning. In the note, Grisham admits that when he first began writing A Time to Kill, (his first novel), that his goal "was simply to complete it." When he finally published it three years later, it sold a few copies and then was pretty much ignored until the success of his second book, The Firm, after which A Time to Kill was released in paperback.

I love the fact that Grisham wrote like it was a hobby. Now, he writes at least one novel a year. Will I ever become an author like that? I have no idea. I honestly don't know if I'd want to. Would I like to be published someday? Yes, most definitely. Will this story I'm working on be my first novel? I highly doubt it.

But I'm still writing it.

It's about a lifestyle I have no experience in and most likely never will. It's about people that I do not know much about. Those two admissions make me pause whenever I work on my story because I realize my limitations. There's only so much one can research. Yet the basic story, or what the original basic story in my heart was, is a very thinly veiled autobiography. There's so much of my self in this little story and that would probably surprise most of you were I to let you read it now. But it's a part of me and it's special.

So I'm still writing.