Yet another set of links...

Some of my published works are on the Net. Searching for them, I suddenly remembered that I used to post like crazy when I was still new on the internet. All those outpourings of the heart posted somewhere on Spyder's Empire. It's grown bigger than I remember it to be, but the search for my own poetry is like searching for a needle in the proverbial haystack. I also remember frequenting Starlite Cafe which was a regular hangout for wannabe poets like me. Looking back, I have to cringe at my own temerity. Youth certainly has daring and knows no fear or inhibition.

I suppose I have always been searching for connection and for ways to grow beyond myself. Aylad was the first group I joined that eventually gave me the courage to dream and to give voice to my dream.

In a discussion on the OWW mailing list, one of the writers asked what it was that kept us writing in the face of rejections and all that.

This mail really struck a chord in me, because I have had my share of rejections this year and it requires so much strength to gather up the courage to send work back out again.

In my mail to the list I wrote:

I sometimes wonder what madness drives me to pick up the pen and write down
those words on paper. Then, I think that if I didn't write I would probably
go mad.

Getting rejections is really hard. Even though I look on it as the next
step on the ladder to learning and improving my craft, it still hurts.
I know I am surrounded by a whole bunch of extremely talented and gifted
wordsmiths, but I stubbornly insist on plowing ahead and trying my best to
be better than myself. To exceed my own limitations is my ambition, to
write something bigger than who I am, is my dream

I am trying to remember when all this began. When simple stories of puppy dogs turned into this quest for more. I realize now that it is not the publication that really matters (although that is great when it happens). What matters is exceeding my own limitations, stretching beyond...crossing the border of what I think I know myself to be into that somewhere land where stories are born of themselves and not of me, where writers are impregnated and give birth to words that make us laugh and cry and rejoice because the words have life. Maybe it sounds weird, but I don't think that stories and words are ours to own. In my mind, stories belong to themselves, they are living entities. We as writers can only step back and wonder because the truth is, that we can write at all is a miracle in itself.