What I Do On the Weekends

On the weekends, when I am not traveling, I read, and especially, I write. Or at least I try to. I have a hard time, though, putting something down because I do put a lot of pressure on myself to write well. I have an english degree after all, with a writing emphasis. I love to write though. About all kinds of things. I have written lyrics to pop songs. Started my autobiography. And began numerous attempts at a great American novel. My favorite, though, are short stories. I can start, and end them, in one sitting.

I started writing short stories in highschool. At first, they were really morbid. I mean, someone died at the end of every one of them. In the first one, a woman's husband, facing financial ruin, goes crazy and jumps out of a second story window, impaling himself on their white picket fence below. Of course, the wife happens to be outside hanging laundry on a line. The blood lands on flowers, and a little bit of spray is within inches of her bare feet. Oddly enough, the wife was hardly phased. And it turned out they were not ruined. My English teacher didn't know what to say.

Then I started writing autobiographical stories. I wrote about my childhood experiences in Georgia. I wrote about everything from hearing the rain on my grandmother's rusty tin roof window to being sexually assaulted by someone on my grandmother's porch. But my mom read one of the stories. And I don't think she liked it very much. So I had to start hiding my writing.

Then my writing went through a light period. I wrote about loving butterflies. I wrote about rose-colored glasses. It was horribly cliche. And fortunately, that was temporary. I went back to the butterfly story, and in the new ending, all the butterflies die.

In college, I wrote about religion. At first, that was positive too. Till I remembered an incident I had as a child, when I halucinated and saw Jesus in my dining room, and how he climbed off the cross and and was going to make me pay for putting him there. I fainted before he reached me. I put it in a story about an irrational fear of batman. Needless to say, at my Christian conservative college, all of the students who listened to the story (or almost all) stopped talking to me. And, oddly enough, I never finished the story. My professor said that at the end, I should include what it meant to the protagonist, and her feelings about religion. I never got around to that. I realized recently, looking back on my writing, that I rarely really finish what I write.

Right now, I find I am writing about relationships. Which I am happy about, because no one is dying. Especially not the "me-like" character in them. But, in my latest story, the antagonist is a little too much like my boyfriend. Who happens to be a really really nice person, so I have no idea how it turned out like that. So in the interest of not offending anyone, I will keep my writing to myself.

Writing short stories, or any writing at all, is a great release, however, and I really enjoy my time spent in creative musing. Work is hard; I rarely am very sure what it is I am supposed to be doing, and routinely I am at the office until 9 o'clock at night or so (and I get here between 8 and 8:30AM). So it is a wonderful experience, early Saturday evening or Sunday morning, to prop myself up in bed, and let the creative side vent, exploring my passions and experiences, the good and the bad, in the form of a me-like protagonist.