What You Want

(from life)

"I have found the best way to give advice to your children," wrote Harry S Truman, "is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it."

Sometimes, life is so complicated that we get caught up in all the day-to-day activities, get bogged down with all the immediate needs, that we lose sight of the basics. Particularly in the midst of a transitional time, it's easy to lose one's way.
Paraphrasing Truman, life is very simple.

Figure out what you want. Then go get it.

There are very few things that I want in this world.
In the life sense, anyway. There are many things I want, generally speaking. I want a Wii, for example. I want a dodgeball championship (accomplished most recently last night). Some cash. A book. A massage. I always want chocolate.
But in the life sense... there are very few things I want. They are:

- To create something that gives others the same sense of wonder, enjoyment, sorrow, and excitement I felt reading some of my favorite fantasy stories.
- To live a worthwhile life, to play hard and fair, to make others' lives better for the brief time I am in them.
- To love, and be loved, by someone special. To be with a girl that I hold higher than everyone else, higher than the world, higher than myself - someone who makes my heart race, makes me want to strive to be the best person I can be just by her mere presence. I want full, fierce, lasting, tender, love. A romance I cannot live without - and as a corollary, will die for, and die happily. There is no greater sacrifice. And none easier.

Those are the three.

#1 is going well, if a little slowly. Not so slowly, however, in the last few months.
#2 is good, though a struggle. I am fairly confident of the existence of God and the sense of right and wrong that exists; but I am not so sure of humankind's interpretation of it and I go to church less than I should.
#3 is the hardest of all, and currently the one exhibiting the least progress.

The bizarre thing is, I have the strongest faith that #3 will happen. Odd, isn't it? That the element that I have the least movement on is the one I am least concerned about? I don't know why this is.
It might be because of my belief in love. I left a long-term relationship, not because the girl I was with was a bad person, but because I wasn't sure that I couldn't live without her. It would have been so much easier to remain, to let things take their course. We were comfortable, had worked well together.
But I want something I can barely think about without cracking a smile. I want someone that is simultaneously my greatest friend, my hardest taskmaster, my best ally and surest confidant.
I am fairly certain that the girl I will be with will be imaginative, will have the capacity to be sensuous, will mix in a slight dose of insanity to keep things interesting and a hundred other things I could list. I am fully certain, however, that the girl I will be with will have traits I will never have thought of, or wouldn't even have picked if I had the option; but they will be part of her, intrinsic and mysteriously integral, perhaps even occasionally contradictory, defying explanation or analysis as to how they combine into something beautiful. I have contradictory traits; my proclivity for formality weighed with my occasionally willful ignorance of public opinion is an example. Human beings are a bizarre mix. Hell, love itself can be like that.
I've felt love, of course. I've had love - love that is comfortable, that is good in its simplicity, that is nice and kind in its persistence.
And that is just what it is. Comfortable. Unassuming. A warm blanket on a somewhat chilly morning, something that encourages you to stay in bed permanently, to shy away from getting up and seeing the sunrise in all it's bitterly bright, beautiful-in-the-cold glory. It's nice to stay in bed, don't get me wrong. But one day you wake up and realize that you traded comfort for beauty; what was easy for what was best; and you realize that your avoidance of something bad comes with the failure to achieve something worth your trouble.

I won't stay in bed any longer.

It will be far from perfect, of course. The love I search for doesn't have to know itself right away. It will have its faults, as nothing involving human beings is ever perfect. But it will be special, and precious, and something worth fighting for. Something worth dying for.
And I have had glimpses of it. I have met two women that have made me sway on my feet, that made my heart rush, that made my stomach turn and my head spin. They questioned, they laughed, they hurt, they loved. They are, indeed, special people.
It can be done.

It is a lot to ask, I know. Some say life is not perfect; others that life is cruel. I disagree, to some extent. At heart, I am an optimist, not an idealist; but I am also a romantic, in the original sense of the word. My stance on love is, in some ways, a gamble - as my refusal to settle for less than the best risks me from experiencing it at all. Women in particular feel this, I understand, as the years go on; they feel as if they are running out of time, that they have to get something or they will have lost, somehow, or maybe just lost their opportunity. I can understand where they are coming from, to some extent. It is a scary proposition to live life alone, particularly when you have not truly experienced love before. I can see why people would settle for something good, instead of something incredible. It is risky.
But I have to try. This is my only life. This is my only chance at existence. If there is a God, I trust that He will help me achieve something so monumental.
And if there is not a God, and this existence is merely a composition of atoms and chance events? That 'love' is a mere biochemical reaction, surviving over millions of years for its evolutionary benefits?
All the more reason I want the highest ideal I can imagine.

This is my life.

I want to write.
I want to make people happier.
I want love.

I want.

.

The Passion

(the commitment)

I have no doubts that I want to write a fantasy story.

I finished Chapter 5 of TFOR - finished finished, including page-level editing work. Nothing was rushed, nothing was forced just to put a last period to a piece of paper; it was complete and worked. It's easy to tell when writing is going well; you look up at your desk and suddenly realize three hours have gone by, and it felt like twenty minutes. That happened with the last pages of Chapter 5.
Now, in olden days, I would print out the story and give the Mar's - Margaret, Martin, and Marla - a separate copy each. Those were great days. I could get three people's different viewpoints on the chapter or section I had given them, and each person offered a different expertise - Margaret's innate sense of character, Martin's view on plot, mood, and excitement, and Marla's technical and sentence structure skills. Unfortunately, now I only have Martin nearby (I'll have to send it out to Margaret), so we headed out to Eat N' Park and we read over Chapter 5.

He didn't like it.

That's not actually true, of course. Martin was pumped to read the chapter, and afterwards still liked the movement of what was happening, liked some of the things in the plot and character. But the manner in which I went about describing one of my main characters, Ru, didn't ring right, and he didn't enjoy it as much as he usually enjoyed my chapters, and told me so.
When that happens, it's not easy for anyone. It's hard to tell someone that you don't like something they've written; it's even harder to hear it. But truthful reading requires it, at least if you really want to get better and write something so good that an editor or house has to publish it. That's a true statement, of course, but it doesn't always make it easy to do.
I remember one time Martin and I were working over a portion of my story - I think Chapter 2 - and he made at least two pages of verb choice and intra-sentence corrections when I just wanted to hear his opinions on the overall feel of the plot and characterization, as if those were missing there was no point in going down to the individual word level. It was quite a heated meeting for a bit until he and I realized that we were on totally different thought processes of analysis. Afterwards we agreed that we would not take offense to each other's comments, that we would meet many times (we hoped) in the future and that we had to be able to give criticism (lightly) and take criticism (liberally). Writing is a personal art, after all, and it can be difficult to receive critiques on something you have mentally sweated and strained towards, something that reflects your creativity, your hard work, and your passion. In writing in particular, critiques of your work often feel as critiques of yourself as a person.
This is why I am happy with the way this meeting worked out. Martin listed his critiques of the chapter, chiefly revolving around the Ru-Valavar connection (as the story is currently written, they're both extremely similar characters), and I concentrated on taking things constructively. And while some comments were hard to hear, I succeeded in taking value out of the comments, and started asking proactive questions. We ended up talking until 2 AM, and I ended up taking three pages of notes and ideas coming from the scene, which ultimately should improve the final product. Perhaps not as great as a comeback from the days of "Why don't they just break the Holocron? 'Whoops! Ok, story's over.' " ...But not bad nonetheless.
Writing goes on.

Today is Barbara's birthday. The thought makes me smile. Happy Birthday, Barb. I miss hearing from her.

So much to talk about - owning a car, riding a bike to work, re-doing my room. The last one is actually the most important, the most meaningful. Another post.

"Without the water, the wisdom of past
slips through your fingers, forgotten so fast."