I mentioned in one of my posts a couple of weeks ago, that a story I had written was lost.  I talked about those fickle and reckless muses, voices that don’t allow me to sleep at night or rest in the peace of quiet.  I have so many voices in my head I often don’t know if I am going insane, or if God has sent me angels to keep me company.   The voices in my head tell me stories, and I write them down not for entertainment, but because I am compelled to.  Losing their story, those 70 pages of words that I had spent months on was excruciating.  It was devastating not only to me but to the voices that lost their souls.

I still feel the pain, even weeks later.  I keep expecting to find those pages, like a mantra from heaven itself.  I keep expecting some lucky soul to stumble upon those words and give me relief from the depression of their loss.  I try to write the words again but they aren’t poetic or beautiful. The sadness is flat, not dimensional, and the fear has no depth.  The pain of life is easily flicked off the shoulders of the characters because they already know it, they have already moved beyond it.

I can’t feel the air, smell the odor of life, or hear the laughter in the misery. My pages don’t flow easily and I am forced to rewrite paragraphs that I don’t like.  I am forced to find the medium between great emotion and good paragraphs.  I am forced to figure out how to say what has already been lived, and I can’t.  The story is still waiting to be told, the characters still are waiting to be lived, but they are waiting for me to catch up.  They are already beyond the lessons that my words are learning, and I simply want to hang my head.

They demand that this story be told, but not the beginning.  And how can a story live if not in the beginning?

I suppose I could simply fly with them and write the book in the middle, but there are consequences of that.  I have to build the characters, and if I build them too quickly then I won’t be able to start the book with any love.  If I don’t introduce the characters how will the reader fall in love?   And if I don’t set the scene how will we ever be able to resolve the solutions?  It is frustrating and makes me often want to take this computer screen and throw it across the room.  I miss those balls of paper that could be thrown.

I am going to keep going, because that is only way I know.  I am going to keep those voices waiting while I once again try to find myself in the words, lines and mentions of worlds I need to live in.  I will take each step so that tomorrow when the world is formed, I am a part of it.