10 Years (and a White-eyed Vireo)

An anniversary surprise

(Written on July 26th, 2024)

Dear Friends,

I offer this note because I am overcome with gratitude and inspired to write! I can't remember the last time I felt so positively bursting with ideas and sentences and titles and words. Never have I felt such furious love for the act of writing. My mind is like a firecracker, sparks flying so fast I couldn't catch each one.

It's a remarkable moment, yet it conceals a banal and, frankly, unsexy lesson, one that reeks of adulthood. A story as stale as paying the bills, or taking in the mail. What does it say that in five years of writing, five years of braving the garage to chisel meaning from nothing, to do battle with that most terrifying beast of all—the empty page—those hundreds, if not thousands, of mornings, that I have only once experienced such rapturous inspiration as I feel today? It tells me, that writing is about the work, the rote discipline that undergirds any form of art.

I want to share this (un)remarkable moment with you, because you are the first 20 people to ever pay for my writing. It's a thrill beyond measure, the greatest achievement to date in my career as a writer, that you have given me. (A close second might be learning how to use the word “diffuse” in a sentence, which was yesterday's glorious feat but doesn't in any way detract from my immense gratitude for your support of what I do.)

Of course, I do not write for the money; there are plenty of more lucrative occupations than the intellectual slogging of wordsmiths. But, the first dollars to land in my bank account this past January validated years of diligent labor, not the least of which was sneaking words past the pompous naysayers that pump my brain with doubt. I can call myself a writer. I can know that what I'm doing is more than a hobby. It's a vocation. A vocation that, thanks to you, I now have time to pursue.

My desk in the garage. This is where the writing and the dreaming happen. Note the Whooping Crane and the three googly-eyed owls at top right! (Photo by Kira Thomas)

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