Well this blog was a long time coming. The First brick in the yellow brick road of it was laid a whole lifetime ago. I was about 8 years old and had finished reading the first book of the summer: The Box Car Children. I spent the entire summer reading each book of the series – all twelve. I read other things that summer but those box car kids called out to me again and again. I followed them from one adventure to the next. I laughed with them and they made me cry, imagine that! I went all over the United States with them and this all from my bunk bed in Michigan. It was like I was living their adventures right along with them and that’s when I knew it, that’s when I knew I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to have that same effect on people – I wanted to make them laugh and cry and take them on crazy adventures without them ever having to leave home. I wanted to share something with them that I knew (or imagined) and I wanted them to see it with me. I wanted to make friends with everyone, everywhere…
And here we are.
I don’t expect I will say anything too profound in my blogs. I don’t expect world leaders to come clamoring or for mikes to be thrust in my face and the crowd hushed, waiting for me to utter something world-changing or Nobel Prize worthy, yet shouldn’t we dare sweet writers? Should we not all of us dare, with pen in hand (or fingers poised over keys) dare to influence as well as entertain? To challenge as well as illicit chuckles, to swim out to the deep and then dare land-lovers to follow us?
Nations were built with the slash of the pen and I dare believe that many were toppled just as easily. Words are powerful tools, welding life and death, peace and pandemonium, unity and mayhem. Change.
Fellow-writers, my brothers and sisters and kin, I feel I can call you that for we are all cut from the same crazy block of wood. We are less writers by choice and more because we simply can’t help ourselves. We simply must get the words out or our heads will split in two.
Well I’ve blogged enough for today. Peace my people.