I Feel It!

Congratulations, you are officially the conduit of my writer's block.

Give yourself a hand!

You see, I am officially writing a book. Now keep in mind, I've said a lot of things in my life, but this time I really mean it. I've made claims that simply weren't true, though I would have denied it at the time, even to myself.

Some have been blatantly false, as in I was just taking a piss. To feel good, because growing up, feeling like me sometimes was too much to bear. That's not the way of it now, so don't feel sorry; it was a different time. One of my college favorites was pretending to be the quarterback of the Washington State Cougars. You had to be pretty stupid to believe it, or perhaps I'm being too self-deprecating. Any guesses on what my name was during the spinning of this yarn?

I also used to pretend to be a member of a "cool" fraternity, to see how the sorority girls would react. There were some houses that were known for only admitting the creme de la creme, so naturally, I wanted to see what it would be like to be part of those elite, and to see if the girls believed it was possible. Most of the time they did. I met a girl in Boston right after I had graduated from Potsdam, so I was still young and could pretend to be in school still. She was gorgeous. And after telling my story for an extended time, I could see that she was actually falling for it in a bigger way than I had expected. And that's when I knew I had blown it. I said I was a Sigma Chi, which I had been for a couple months. She asked me for the secret handshake, which I knew. But something in my manner gave me away. I'm guessing it was my guilt. As she stomped away, I knew I had given my last performance.

But I'm way off on a tangent here. I'm talking about the lies I tell myself, which naturally extend to the rest of the world. I tell myself that I can do anything, that I can learn guitar for instance, that soon I will be good enough to be in a band; I'm a great singer, though I'm actually quite limited; I'll someday own my own computer software company; I'm a great manager of people. It's the power of positive thinking on steroids, and it has its advantages. But after awhile, people stop listening, or glaze over as I describe my newest, biggest dream. Writing, however, is more than a dream. I'm actually doing it.

My mentor has read quite a bit of my work in progress, and for the first time, I'm getting the sense that he really believes I can do it. Not that he hasn't been in every way quite positive and complimentary, and maybe nothing on his end has changed; maybe the change has occurred inside me.

Either way, the result is the same.

I'm tasked with outlining my story, and that is how I started this post, looking at the blank screen of my outline and thinking, "What else could I do right now to avoid this for a little while more?" But I did manage to eke out some more details (I started this post late last night), and even came up with a killer ending, and more than one scene in between.

It's gonna happen. I feel it!