Powers

I have heard said that we all have a superpower or two. Some people are brilliant musicians, others amazing with numbers, machines, or computers, some can teach like no one else and others could sell ice to Eskimos. My superpower happened to be art, I could visualize things that no one else could and then commit them to paper in a beautiful and colorful way that all could see. I was never genius level by any means, but I could and did make a pretty good living at it for more then 40 years. In the end I was laid off by economic pressures and my just plain weariness of working in the graphic arts for so long.

I thought that I could never recapture that amazing feeling of creating something new with my head and hands again, but life has a way of doing the thing you least expect. I have always been interested in writing and it finally bubbled to the surface a little more then 10 years ago and I began to write a series of novels that had been hiding in my head for most of my life. And now I am getting close to finishing up the fourth and pretty much the concluding novel in my current story arc.

Novels can be very complicated and mine are no exception. But as I wrote my way through them, with a half-baked notion of how they would progress and then conclude, I have found that I am fairly good at it. (In my own opinion of course.) The problems of writing a coherent narrative and consistent characters have been pretty much overcome with a little help from the people and the situations that I have placed them in. Lately, I have been writing pretty much to find out how the story finally ends, it is a interesting way to do it, but it appears to work for me. There have been some profoundly satisfying moments when the murkiness of the situation clears up and the story makes complete sense and everything falls into place. It is very much like throwing a bunch of color at a board and with many brush strokes turning it into something recognizable and beautiful. They are both powerful feelings and some that I hope to keep experiencing.

(Below, Just like signing a painting, a book with your name (and art), on it is an extremely pleasurable part of the creative process.)

[image error]