Inspirations pt 02

So, I had my big idea.

I was energized and ready to turn it into something.

I made what has often seemed in retrospect like a huge mistake. I told everyone about it. Anyone who would listen knew about my big story idea, about the library at the end of the world and my ambition to become a writer. It ensured I would always be worried that people saw me as a failure for as long as I had never written a book.

            For years after people would ask about it and I had to tell them the truth in one form or another, that I had tried time and again, tried and failed to make the idea come out. It had come out ugly or stopped after just so many pages. It hung in my head like a menacing form in the back of a closet, an ambition I was not equal to.

            Somewhere in those years I read and was deeply affected by Ursula K Leguinn’s Tales of Earthsea series, particularly The Tombs of Atuan.

The imagery from Tombs of Atuan would never leave my mind .

The priestess of a subterranean religion, isolated from society and grappling with the urge to emerge against a sense of duty to remain hidden, had a nearly permanent resonance.

Leguinn’s clear unaffected style of writing rang true. Not condescending or childish but also not ornate or overly complex, it felt like permission to write simply. Which can be more challenging than affecting a self-conscious pose but it was exhilarating to contemplate the possibility.

           I was nearly forty when I finally became capable of finishing anything. I had come up with a headful of ideas over the years but had never been the writer necessary to complete them. It was not until I spent two and a half years in my late thirties as a high school teacher, in a pressure cooker of rapid fire requirements, building lessons on the fly, reacting in real time to student needs and proficiencies, creating something out of nothing and just having to deliver it whether it felt done or not, that the pathways connected in my head so that I could finally push through and finish anything.

Finally, ideas became reality. I wrote books.

I’d written three in under three years and felt ready to attack the big one, the one that had always been there, the library at the end of the world.

The Tombs of Atuan came back to me and had a considerable effect.

I changed what had always been a male protagonist in my head to female. That was an important step because I found this perspective far more compelling to write about. Also, where my earlier attempts had always aimed at florid stylistically complex prose, I now tried to keep things direct and simple. The image of an underground city took shape as well. 

The result is finally here and

Two more installments will be released over the coming year.