100 Posts! WOW

I just noticed this is my 100's blog. That is worth something. I keep at it! That is how I am feeling today as I ponder my inner child (see last entry for more details on her).

What is the essence of my work? Why do I write or even read for that matter? I have been thinking about characters who go on an adventure and come back to a more contented self, those who seek out something bigger and those who shrink inside themselves. That is the choice I have for myself in each  moment. What is the power of intention that is outlined in author's words, characters experience? In good stories, there is moment outside oneself, like waking from a moving dream. A moment where we glimpse new possibilities. 

I have been reading a novel with a reliable and an unreliable character. At the start, I just accepted the narrators' words until he began hinting at hiding and at a game and hoping people would not find out about his affair, his alibi (he says he thought the police would be stupid - and maybe the reader too?). I keep feeling like I am looking inward, all of the sudden finding things I have hidden and that are now written on my forehead. 

Along with the novel mentioned above (that I don't want to give away), I am in the middle of several other novels. By my bed are The Count of Monte Christo, one on Genocide, Zetoun, and To the Lighthouse. On my shelves and in piles along my walls are years of others that eye me saying, you don't know how I end (The What is the What, The Return of the King, Tes of the Durbervielles, Harry Potter, Iris, etc.) 

Each feel like my own Gandalf is knocking on my door: (so I just have to include the first bits of The Hobbit)

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats—the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill—The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it—and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage. The best rooms were all on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden, and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.

This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses had lived in the neighbourhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him. This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours’ respect, but he gained—well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.

As I work on, I wonder at the adventure of this season. I contemplate the real endings to each story I start. Will my heroin remain alone and angry or hide from the world. Will she jump into something that requires more then she thinks she can manage. Will the result be love, death, or more adventures? What do I tell my readers? Can I say, "well, you know how it ends right? Just add that part in after you get to my last words, or flip to page 84 for happy and page 92 for sad and page 203, if you like surprises." 

I really want the struggle, because that is where I sit, but I hope for you to burst up from under water like the Count and gasp for air and then swim miles and miles, knowing you want to find the treasure (and life past past regret?). So for me it is something new, a painting of this inner child, a finished story I might post here or another class that lets me put my trust in the creator.