After a serious rain delay — like all day yesterday — it looks like more of the same today. I’ve decided to borrow a post from another blog I started some time ago and will probably terminate. At least I can get it published and then unplug the computer. Lightning in the area and all that. Borrowed text follows.
On an odd night some time back, when I couldn’t get to sleep, I started playing “what if.” As in, “what if I hadn’t done so-and-so twenty odd years ago, and instead had done something else.” It can be a dangerous, habit forming sort of game, and can end up making you unhappy with any decision you’ve ever made and afraid to make new ones. But anyway.
This particular what if game actually inspired me to get out of bed and write about it. And here’s the result, more or less. I’ve done some rearranging to make it more coherent.
“Oh, the Seventies. The Eagles and Fleetwood Mac. Desperado, Tequila Sunrise, and Rhiannon. Heart. Dreamboat Annie and Magic Man. The flight line.
“When I joined the Air Force I hoped it would be my path to a future as a zookeeper. Instead I got distracted chasing guys, chasing the perfect concert, the perfect high, the perfect song. Every day I took my heart out and broke it against another guy — like cracking an egg against the side of a bowl. I was out of my mind. I had no idea what to do with my feelings.
“And I’m carried right back every time I hear Hotel California or New Kid in Town. There I am again behind the wheel of my pick-up, driving the streets and highways in and around Phoenix. Sometimes I wish I could go back and do some things differently. What if I had just said no when Randy said he would come back to Texas with me after we got out? What if I had just loaded up my truck with my own stuff and got on with my own life — the one I had thought I had all planned out?”
The next day I started writing a novel about a young woman who joins the Air Force with the idea of using the GI Bill to go to college at the end of the four year enlistment. The idea was that my main character would do things a little differently than I did. She would still be on her own when she got out of the military, and she would continue her education, keep her eye on the prize rather than get into a relationship where she ended up submerging most of her plans, as I did.
Over the next few months I got several chapters written, and most of them were like little vignettes, with separate little dramas opened and closed in less than 1000 words. I had never done anything like it before. But then, I had never sat down and figured out how to use some of the things that actually happened to me to serve as the basis for a story. Of course I exaggerated the bejabbers out of everything. Funny thing, though. It began to be a story about being in the Air Force, working on the flight line, dealing with the guy thing, more than it was about getting out and having the ideal life as a serious scientist — which was kind of what I had started off to do.
For now, the project is on hold. I lost my momentum when I started working a part time job in late 2007, and I haven’t gotten back into it. I have to finish it, though. I hate not finishing something.
