Today I feel like a writer

2.5 years ago, I read Harry Potter 7 for the first time. As I was reading the end of it, it was a very spiritual experience to me. It changed me. And it was then that I realized that my calling in life, if you will, was to be a writer.

It seemed kinda duh once I realized it. I mean, as soon as I could make letters, I was writing books. I wrote a ton as a kid, and even in high school when I had gotten past the idea that I thought I wanted to be a writer as a profession, I still kept about 10 different journals, and wrote in 3-4 of them daily. I write. It is what I do.

But the idea of writing fiction is a bit daunting to me, not that writing non-fiction at any length is any less daunting, because then I get worried about factuality. But, I felt like writing is what I am meant to do, and that fiction writing should be a component of that.

So I started writing fiction. And I'd write a little scene here and there, and I was so scared of writing that it was more convincing myself that I could actually sit down and write something than actually being anything I wanted to write about. I found a few things that interested me, and my mind still goes back to some of my favorite scenes from things I have written, but there doesn't seem to be much more than just a couple pages there. Then there is of course Words and Understanding, the short story I wrote. I still really like that story, and I feel a depth to it, though I think the writing of it does not convey it all, and I am not really sure why, but I also don't like it -that- much that I care to invest a lot of time in figuring out how to make it better.

So I was writing daily for a few months then, and then life kinda overcame me, and my fiction has gotten patchy. Then maybe a week or so ago, I decided I was going to be disciplined and start working on fiction again. So I've been making scenes or whatever, just like normal, only this time, I wasn't so overly concerned with product and doing something amazing, and just felt like it was the flow of things.

So I sat down to write last night at 2:30am. Thought I would be in bed by 3am, which is the late end of normal for me, but still not abnormal. I started writing, and I could not stop. I wrote until 4am, and I just stopped in the middle of something, because I decided I needed to sleep at some point. Then today I was working on developing characters, and I just see about 100 things that I could do to work on this story, and all these things that will be for background, so I know what is going on and can write it all better, and include the little details that don't seem important, but make something set out, because the secondary characters are really developed, and -I- care about them.

And so I have stepped into this world, and I want to discover so much of it, and find out about these 12 people that I have, and then there will be more they come into contact with. I have found something where I want to go back to it the next day, and probably will the next and the next. And who knows when I will want to move on to something else. But today I feel like I am truly a writer.

And I like the feeling.