Goals

It's been almost five months since I last posted and it seems right that this is the lead post away from that silence. There were several personal goals and deadlines that I'd set for myself during the beginning of the year:

• Stop blaming the negative drag on my mood as remnants from the election
• Finish a story I'd begun for my husband
• Finish the poetry book I'd been inspired to start last year
• Before the recent local author book festival
• Before the beginning of May
• Before the first half of the year was gone
• Before this meeting and then that meeting
• Outline the duology about suburban magic
• Outline a vampire novel about a vampire who decides to give up the faith
• Actually decorate for my husband's birthday
• Finish the short stories that would serve as the introduction to the book of poetry
• Finish just the one short story featuring a monkey
• REALLY. Sit down and work on the monkey story.
• There is a story. About a monkey who wrecks a woman's ability to enjoy stories once upon a time. FINISH IT.
• Forget about the monkey story.
• No, you're not going to work on that story.
• STOP NOTICING MONKEYS EVERYWHERE.
• Crap. Okay, one page hinting at the theme of the monkey story. In this tiny notebook. And then stop.

And then I picked up a book by an author whom I've met and looked at it. Looked at the back, where the blurbs sparkles like bubbles down to the edge of the dust jacket. Looked at the cover, looked at the table of contents, weighed the entire book in one hand, thumbed through the pages. Thought about all the work that had gone into that book. Asked myself whether goals deferred and goals unmet meant goals that I no longer believed in or cared about.

Seriously considered that what I really wanted to be and do was something else and that writing was always a second choice.

Once upon a time there was a monkey who could see that some things--stories, dreams--were alive in a way that animals are not. It wanted to know what they were made of. All it needed was a room and two little kids who would believe in the buttons and dials and Jacob's ladders of a lab long enough for the monkey to see through to the bones of the stories and a few tame stories.