october 11.

I sat down on my back deck with my laptop and good intentions over three hours ago.

Thankfully, it worked.

I'm telling you. This deck is magic. I had to write a story for an assignment when I was thirteen. I sat out here with one strong, resilient candle and by the time I went back inside, fingers cramped from scrawling, the pivotal moment in it, the part around which everything else fell, was finished. First try. Sure, not that cool when you're thirteen - but that story and that moment is haunting me to this day, over five years later, and I know it's ready to be revisited. Taunting me to take it on and bring it into now and write it the way it was designed to be created. This scares me more than it excites me, mainly because the characters scare me in much the same way, but sometimes there's voices in your head you've got no choice of outrunning and I'd say five years is a fairly decent fight. I'll give in when I can. Soon.

I've spent the last week stuck in this one conversation, lying down on her kitchen floor over and over again, writing and deleting and rewriting and deleting again until I was ready to scream or cry and give up (sound familiar?). And then, sitting out here tonight, a blanket wrapped around me in this half-spring, there was a moment through all of the pushing where something clicked inside me and I quite literally started crying and I knew, I knew, I knew why this was so difficult to write, couldn't believe how long it took me to catch on in the first place. You know what scares me, about all of this? You really do write what you know, but you do it without knowing you know it. You create these people and situations and pains and triumphs and as you chisel away at it line by line there's certain moments where you take a step back and get blown away by who you suddenly see emerging in them. The moments from your own life that slipped themselves in, taking on a new form but retaining their power. I don't know how to explain it and it was honestly like a revelation before when I realised. It's not a cliche or a lie made up to tease us. These words and pages become outpourings, whether we invite them in or not.

But now. Now I'm up off the floor. I haven't sent this version of the conversation (8.34923232 or whatever it's up to by now) to the scratchpad (yet... Oh, please, I hope not). And, once again, I have this sanctuary to thank for it. I know it won't be mine for much longer but I know it'll continue to serve its inhabitants, giving whatever they need to take from it.