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A quote: “Try to keep your mind open to possibilities and your mouth closed on matters that you don’t know about. Limit your ‘always’ and your ‘nevers.'” ~~ Amy Poehler
I’ll start with a story …
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They came every day. Mother with baked goods, Father talking with the contractor.
Sarah watched from the same spot. One builder waved to her each day. She didn’t wave back.
Day after day, month after month. He waved, she watched.
He was at the final walk-through, doing touch-ups on the closet door in her room. She noticed three tiny carvings under the doorknob. He touched them, 3-1-2. Behind the door was a sunlit corridor. Sarah could smell rain-fresh air and growing things.
The man with silver eyes like hers looked down, “You’ll know when the time comes. Save your family.”
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license.
GWB says: “Try to keep your mind open to possibilities and your mouth closed on matters that you don’t know about. Limit your ‘always’ and your ‘nevers.’” ~~ Amy Poehler
The possibilities to which I keep my mind open are those held in God’s hand. My mouth opens to praise Him. My ‘always’ is in God and my ‘nevers’ are without Him. Except one – He will never let me down or let me go.
Joe R. says: First one to quote Amy Poehler, loses.
Cameron says: The house was coming along as planned. With a well for water, generator for backup power and a fully stocked pantry, we were pretty close to off grid and self sufficient. Not only could we home school the kids, but a few neighbors were willing to help out once their houses were complete.
Oh, the people chained over to that rock over there? Government busybodies who fought us every step of the way when we tried to build on land we owned for well over a century. They were sentenced to watch the house get built. We’ll free them later.
When I was little, the world was full of magic. There were tiny people living under the steps, and I knew all about their lives hidden from the ordinary world. The mats in the gymnasium hid secret doors into an underground world with dangerous villains that had to be outwitted. The house I saw going up as I passed on the school bus was being built for the deposed crown prince of a magical land.
Much as I loved all those stories, I soon discovered that the patience of adults for hearing about them was limited. Say more than two sentences in a row and I was “going on and on,” even as they yammered forever about the tedious and the boring. But their things were Real, and therefore important and worthwhile, while mine were “just made up,” and therefore trifles, a waste of time.
Somewhere along the line, one or another adult encouraged me to write my stories down instead of chattering about them. But as my skills improved and writing narrative came more easily to me, it suddenly became the object of Adult Authority’s hostility. Writing was well and good as a hobby, but it was not work, and must not be allowed to crowd out the tasks they expected me to accomplish, even the boring and repetitive busywork assignments that I loathed. Besides, it was so very hard to get published and become a real writer, and so very few ever became successful. Better to resign myself to writing for the dresser drawer, in my spare time, and focus on getting a good job.
I refused to be dissuaded, although the endless stream of rejection slips filled folders, boxes, whole file cabinets. Even when the World Wide Web made it possible for anyone to put their writing before the public, the experts warned that putting up your fiction would succeed only in branding you a perpetual amateur, foreclosing forever the possibility of making the leap to professional writer.
And then everything changed, as several online platforms opened new programs that allowed anyone to publish their digital books, and then paperback books, not in a separated literary ghetto, but right alongside the offerings of the big New York and London publishers. Instead of struggling to figure out what acquiring editors were buying this year, you could write the book you believed in and sell it to a worldwide market.
At first I hesitated, fearing some kind of gotcha. I’d lived too many years under the old rules, and stepping off the traditional path seemed an invitation to trouble. But finally I took the plunge and put up one of those novels that had gotten an endless stream of “very nice, but not quite for us” rejections.
Maybe it’s not the five and six-figure advances we used to dream of, but I’m getting my writing out there at last. Instead of the endless stream of rejections, my biggest problem is finding my audience, making it possible for them to discover my works amidst the explosion of creativity the Indie Revolution has unleashed.
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