Club 4-6

Last week at almost this time, I joined Club 4-6.  That’s just my fancy way of making getting older sound hip and cool.

Forty six years old.  About halfway through this life, if I make it to 92.  It does make one reflect about where one has been, where one is, and where one is going.

Some people are born with a silver spoon in their mouth.  I used to think that I had been born with a pen in my tiny fingers.  That I had been destined to be a writer.  I wrote all the time…from a mystery series scribbled on the backs of Prange’s charge card slip tablets that my dad brought home from work, to a gothic novel I wrote in 7th grade.  I had graduated to regular notebooks by then.  I had a following of readers.  They would ask me daily, “Did you write any more yet?” and my notebooks would get passed around in school.  One of my friends was quite talented at drawing, and there are sketches of hers in the margins depicting the scenes.  She ended up becoming my sister in-law.  Her talent for drawing, like mine for writing, seems to have receded into the background of busy adult life: working, relationships, raising kids, trying to make ends meet.

I used to send my mystery stories to a published author friend of my mom’s.  She would read them and send them back with glowing comments.  Back when I was in Club 1-1, she wrote (and I’m paraphrasing here from memory), “Don’t listen to those who tell you to publish NOW.  You will have plenty of time for that, after you’ve lived a bit longer and have more life experience to write about.  But one thing I know for sure: you WILL be a writer!”

You WILL be a writer.

That has always stuck with me.

Yet here I am, in Club 4-6, about as far from a writer as could be.

There are people in my life who encourage me to write.  I could use the excuse of “I don’t have time” but that is lame.  I guess I don’t want to admit the truth: that I don’t know what to say.  The gears that used to crank, the imagination and excitement of characters, plot lines, schemes, surprises…I just wonder if they are working anymore.  Maybe I’m not meant to invent people and plots.  Maybe I’m meant to write non-fiction, memoirs, biographies, whatever.

But I WILL be a writer.

And the only way to do that is to start.  That’s why I started this blog.  I’m still not sure what I’ll blog about in future posts.  But, hey, it’s what you do in Club 4-6.

Thanks for reading.