The Write Life

Anyone with a modicum of sentience has realized by now that I'm a frustrated writer.

Check that - I'm often frustrated, and I'm a writer. And sometimes, yes, my worlds collide and I strain to express what's inside.

It's been a curse and a blessing since I was a kid. My classmates would bemoan the 2-page composition they needed to write for English class. I'd have trouble limiting myself to 5 pages, and often used a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a typewriter to bang out my ideas.

And this was in the fourth grade.

Although I make my living from business writing now, fiction is what truly nourishes my spirit and tugs at my heart. And so, in a fit of mad inspiration, in 2007 I signed up for National Novel Writing Month, which (as the name implies) is the insane attempt to write a 50,000-word manuscript in 30 heady, creative, and likely unhygienic days.

I won NaNoWriMo in 2007 with 5 days to go, completing my first novel, a thriller set in the 1980s in my hometown. In 2008, I went for something completely different: a magical realism story about a mythical painter who exists across multiple eras and countries, and whose work changes the lives of everyone who encounters it. I won that year too, hitting the magic 50K mark in a coffee shop at about 5 pm on the last day of NaNo month, after a marathon 36 hours without sleep in which I wrote nearly 30,000 words. If it wasn't for the last minute, I'd get nothing accomplished.

2008 is also when I met Pat and Mike, at a Write-In for NaNo participants. Pat is a gifted writer of fantasy, crime stories featuring a unique detective, and lately, a four-book trilogy (yes, I know what I just wrote) in the science/thriller genre. The woman is utterly possessed when writing; she won the Muskoka Literary Festival last year, outwriting her closest competitor by many thousands of words, and emerging from the 3-day event with the complete first draft of her scientific thriller.

Mike is quieter but no less fierce. He's into dark stories and historical fiction. I'll always think of him as The Professor because of his penchant for research - before, during, and after he writes his pieces. He's no less successful, having just sold his first short story for publication, and working on the second draft of his 2009 NaNo novel.

Together, the three of us hang out in coffee shops across the city on the occasional week night, summoned by someone's impromptu message on Facebook, and drawn together time and again by the prospect of laughs, ideas, coffee and conversation with fellow writers.

And so it was tonight that after my play rehearsal and without prior notice, Mike dropped in to pick me up and drive me over to yet another Second Cup location with Pat. Several fun, productive and laughter-filled hours ensued... along with, maybe, a pretty good short-story idea...