Waking up a dream

I'm 35. This year, my wife and I moved into our dream house after six frustrating and stressful years of trying to move out of our first home. Now, we and our two children have a wonderful place to live.

When I was 15, my dream was to be one of two things – bass player in rock band or a novelist. I'm was always a pretty mediocre musician at best, but I could write. Or so I thought, anyway. I chose my beloved University of Iowa based solely on its world renown graduate fiction writing program, the Iowa Writers' Workshop. My mother made me reply to at least one other school just to be safe. I barely bothered. I was a Hawkeye.

I actually made it into a select portion of the university's undergraduate creative writing program (taught by some talented Writers' Workshop graduate students), but the truth was I wasn't ready to become a world renown fiction writer. I got the journalism bug not long after I decided I needed to have some kind of job. I needed that job because I wanted to marry my girlfriend – now wife – and have a home and family. That desire outweighed my novelist dream.

I got a great education along the way, and a degree in English and journalism both. The journalism degree turned out well. I've been working at a media company for 13 years, and have a respectable income sufficient to buy this wonderful house I'm sitting in now.

No regrets. I knew all along I was making choices that would prevent me from being the writer I dreamed of being some day. Pay the bills first. Feed the kids. Get a nice home for us to have a decent life in. Then, writing.

Ok, not even then. I'm currently a graduate student . . . in a Masters of Business Administration program. Not exactly a beatnik existence, huh? At least it's also at Iowa! Life-long Hawkeye, here. Classes chew up a lot of my time, and will continue for a couple more years. But, it helps my career considerably. It ensures my kids have great coverage and a college education some day.

Still, I didn't lose that creative urge entirely. For much of my leisure time over the last 10 years, I created indie role-playing games. I had some decent success, too, and wrote and published three unique games – a Western game called Dust Devils, a horror game called 44: A Game of Automatic Fear, and a Greek myth inspired modern fantasy called Nine Worlds. The latter two are available for free at StoriesYouPlay.com.

But all of that added up to much less time reading, and almost zero time writing fiction.

About two months ago, something changed – the kind of change I think people require before they can will themselves into doing something hard. After all this time, I wanted to read fiction again. I've read more books in the last two months than I have in the last two years. It's refreshing, and it's not going away any time soon. Something in me clicked.

Something else clicked, too. I got that desire to write again, that dream revived. And, I confess, it remains just a desire. Writers write, of course. So, all I can say so far is that aspiring writers research. I've spent my last few days writing some imaginative notes about the age of sail, the moons of Jupiter, Archimedes, and Pascal. Oh, and pirates.

There's a wonderful idea there, begging to get out as a work of long fiction. It'll take hard work, patience and willpower, all amid an already very busy life of work and school and family and friends. Given 20 years of distant dreams, I have no illusions how challenging it will be.

I'm going to give it a shot.