Day Seventeen: Running in Place

Daily Word Count: 2,417
Cumulative Words Written: 37,915
Total Words Discarded: 5,200
Total Chapters Drafted: 15
Time Spent Writing Today: 3 hours

I spent today running in place. Metaphorically, not literally. Because of my ankle injury, I stayed in my pajamas all day. Lay in bed with my foot propped on pillows. Limped to the kitchen to refill my ice pack and returned to my haven. Avoided everyone.

I read more than I wrote.

Sometimes, residencies are like that. I’m here to work but can’t get my juju with my foot elevated. The computer is unwieldy in my lap. My ankle throbs when I remove the pillows and try to write with my foot on the mattress. I give in, prop my foot up again, pick up someone else’s book.

I finished Elena Ferrante’s epic Neopolitan series with the final installment, The Story of the Lost Child.

They’re wordy books with moments of true brilliance. I love some of her metaphors. Not once did anything seem heavy-handed. And her style is very different from mine, dense paragraphs packed with description, sometimes words cover the whole page. Ferrante never fears expressing herself, even if she refuses to let us know who she is or whether she is, in fact, female. Maybe anonymity makes her bolder. I don’t know.

With every book, I’ve let fear govern the words. Fear of what my parents think. Of bad reviews. Of trolls and harsh judgment. Fear of everyone reading. Of no one reading. Of losing hold of my creative vision. Fear of toiling my whole life on my vision, yet nobody cares.

I’m here to banish my life-long fear.

And so today, I wrote a chapter about the power of fear. We witness it every day. Both legitimate headlines and tricky propaganda encourage our running in place, our constant fear.

Growing up, I was taught to fear knowledge, because knowledge led people to reject God. Art came from sinful, depraved places. Science was riddled with deviant falsehoods designed to ignore the preeminence of Christ. At any moment, the government could take away my right to worship as I chose. Wherever I looked, I saw examples of the chipping away of the protections of my faith.

I’m glad I no longer live in that world, but plenty of people still do. And that’s what I’m grappling with, trying to convey. How that happens. What these groups are like from the inside. Who the players are. Why so many people follow them, even to the point of voting against their own interests.

I’m still not sure I can do it, even after almost 40,000 words. But I keep writing, because I’m no longer afraid.

To follow my residency at Buinho Creative Hub from the beginning, CLICK HERE and read forward.