As rain began to patter across my windshield, I listened to a teacher in New York who was fired from his job because he has Tourette's Syndrome. His distress and grief came through and I felt for him. What , I thought, a story. Obviously, it isn't a good story, in that it isn't a story about good things. But it was a good story because it had merit. It had worth. And I thought that it'd be so nice if my life had that, too--a story of worth or merit. That isn't to say that my life is bereft of anything dramatic or interesting. It's just that my life is so simple, so padded, so convenient that I hardly notice the bumps as bumps--they all feel like mass potholes when, in reality, they're mostly just pebbles. I guess a large part of it is that I spend so much time talking about writing and teaching others about writing and thinking about writing that I never sit down and hammer out sentences, putting one letter after another until the page is blank...
Personal musings of Steven Dowdle