those who can't knit...

I have not done any knitting over the past week, which explains the lack of a post about knitting on Tuesday. I haven't even run the yarn through those 8 stitches on the mitten to finish it! Why? I don't know exactly, but I haven't felt like it, and I've had a lot of things to do for work, and I had a hockey tournament over the weekend, and I was busy. (I did, however, finally pick up some knitting this morning on the bus - more of the Wave Skirt. I'm liking it, but I should have chosen different colors.)

I have, however, been doing something else that I think is productive in my spare time: writing. You may not have picked up on this, but I really enjoy writing. I always have. One of my childhood friends and I wrote little books instead of playing with Barbies and the like. I believe I began writing my first novel when I was 9. It was a terrible story idea, I didn't get more than the equivalent of a chapter finished, but I had pages upon pages of plans for that book! The planning has always been my favorite part. In middle school I had in fact created an entire series of books, none of which were really ever written (and none of which had much of a plot, as I recall). And so it is today.

The piece I started working on again last week is installment 12 of 15ish in a series of "short" stories (they range from a handful of typewritten pages to 40 pages each) that I first started writing about 10 years ago. It is also one of many plans for the cast of characters I have since fallen in love with (I know where they all go to college, what their jobs are, who they marry, how many kids they have...and the characters are only 15 years old in the stories thus far). It all began back in high school...

I was doing my brother's paper route one afternoon. Delivering newspapers in a suburban neighborhood requires a good set of legs to carry you and a map telling you which few houses don't get the paper. It gives one a long time to think as she tramps across lawns. Somewhere towards the final quarter of the route, I was struck with this idea of a shy girl (...not entirely unlike myself) getting up the guts to talk with a cool guy (...not entirely unlike the guy I had a crush on, who lived at the end of the street I was walking along) and then having something unexpected happen. Not the world's most novel idea, but I went with it. Thus began the world of two best friends in high school, Anna and Tasha, and this guy Chris, whom Anna sets out to change for the better, but who ends up changing her in the end. How dramatic!

It's perhaps not surprising that after having worked on these pieces for 10 years, it's the most developed work-of-fiction concept I have had (also the fact that I was older than 12 when it all started probably helped). But what I didn't mention was that I wrote 3 novel-length collections of stories about these people before I graduated high school. My friends and my mom told me I should try to publish. I needed to put some more work into the stories; I wasn't satisfied with them. Then came college...and the dark abyss of writing creativly. I wrote about proteins and Bosnian history and viruses that infect bacteria and how Schubert spent his last years and why my unknown compound disappeared in organic chemistry lab (although...if that's not creative writing, what is?), but no stories.

Finally, for some unknown reason, I dug up the old stories. I remember very vividly thinking, "These have potential, but...they could be a lot better!" So I began to rewrite the summer after I graduated from college. I got pretty far that summer, and then...I stopped again. I somehow got to part 12, and when I pulled it out again last week realized that I had began part 12 in...2004!! That is really sad. My poor characters are stuck in some pretty desperate situations - one's brother is in the hospital, the other's grandma is dying, one of the boys has a bad reputation to counter-act, and one of the girls is recovering from being the victim of the bad reputation. Plus there's all the other everyday concerns of high school, and the fact that the main characters are trying to live Christian lives in a very non-Christian environment (did anyone else go to a high school like that? Didn't think so). I need to write them out of those spots!!! They're depending on me!!

...And then when I'm done, I've got to go back and revise all those rewritten stories again, because, reading them now, they have potential, but...they could be a lot better!