I took a walk...

I took a walk today up to Albertsons.  The air was clear, cold, and the sun was finally out.  It is beautiful up in Columbia Village.  We have a great view of the low mountains to the north of the valley, and the sky stretches forever to the east, west, and south.  I take walks primarily for exercise, but it also clears my head, and helps with my anxiety.  It has also become a great stirrer of my imagination.  For about a year now I have traveled the same route up to the main grocery store, coffee shop, and small local businesses.  It is about 2 miles one way.  It takes me about 1/2 an hour, and I have time to let my mind wander while my spirit is fed by the visual beauty of my surroundings.

 I stop at the Cafe Capri to have coffee- usually iced, even when brutally chilly outside, and sometimes I linger there, but more often I head out as soon as I've finished the last drop.  It is on the way home, when I come down the opposite way from the shops, and cut through the Simplot Sports Complex; a large and open park that hosts soccer, and baseball in warmer weather, that my mind sinks in to whatever subject lays waiting.  One Sunday, a week or two ago, it was masticating on fan fiction, and I was flying through time and space with The Doctor, when it occurred to me what a vain waste it really was.  Why was I exerting all this mental and emotional effort on someone else's story?  Why would I put time and effort into their creations but never my own?  It was right then that my mind switched the track and I began to think about the story I had put off writing for years. 

I wasn't starting from scratch; I had put down 25 pages last November during National Novel Writing Month- a far cry from the 50,000 word goal, but I wasn't complaining.  At that time I had the beginning, but as I walked the paved path through the park I found I had my ending.  I now have the arduous task of finding the middle, and who knows how my beginning and ending will suffer for that lack of planning.  Today in my mind I watched as my main characters met for the first time, and I began to think on their story; where they will go and how they will change.  It will take time to fill all the gaps in-between.  A lot of walks will be taken.

 It is my desire to finish this story, find a critique group to help me in revising, and eventually, attempt to have it published as my first novel.  I will continue to enter into the stories of others, and dream I have a part to play in them, but now I will enter into stories of my own creation, to play the biggest role of all.