Dancing through Doorways

The Room At The End of The Hall~

July 4th, 2020 was the day Ms. Chicken Pants decided to crack her knuckles and start writing again.

 

To clarify, I am not referring to writing song lyrics, notes for choreography, introspective journal entries, or multi-colored To-Do lists of which I'm the queen. Not the stories I had been writing in my head for years as I drift off to sleep or the ongoing antics of Brownie & Glowy that I used to spontaneously tell my son. Speaking of nighttime stories...

When my son was three, he had a penguin with a belly that lit up the whole room. He found it at Bed, Bath & Beyond and held it up while delivering his very first "I love you more than anything mommy, can I have this toy?" expression. I'm a sucker. The penguin came home and made friends with the brown bunny on his bed. My son would fall asleep giggling about the trials and tribulations of a bunny and a penguin's school picture day misadventures or the disaster that ensued when the troublesome duo was asked to repaint Glowy's house. I refuse to confess to any real-life similarities.

Even though telling stories and weaving them into our daily lives was as normal as singing about putting away the laundry, I was worried. Would my writer's voice be too weak from lack of use? It's one thing to toss creativity all over the house like confetti and quite another to give it structure. 

In developing my dance choreography, music coaxed out the emotional ideas that haunted my dreams. The dancers influenced the direction of the work, and a story soon followed. Modern dance has a strong abstract element, so character and story were my way of giving the dancers something to hold on to--an identity within the work. But, sitting at my laptop underneath a large blue umbrella on the back patio taking refuge from the hot sun, questions of self-doubt crept it. Was my storytelling going to collapse at the side of my creative road like an out-of-shape dancer afraid her body will fail when she finally returns to class? 

Everybody knows self-doubt is a killer, but at this point in my life, I know what kind of arrows to shoot at it, deflating its importance. I flexed my fingers over the keys... and danced through the doorway of a room long closed.

When I first walked into that old abandoned room, I had no expectations. But, much to my delight, was hooked from the first sentence to the last of my first 320 page draft of Secrets of the Shatteredl Realms. Every day, words spilled across the page as I desperately tried to keep up with the movie playing in my head. No longer a slave to set studio times or availability of dancers, I created to my heart's content. Of course, when you have a family who relies on you, you come up for air, but over the 6 weeks it took me to write that first draft, I fell in love with writing all over again, and I celebrated the return of the imaginary girl who had helped inspire so many stories in my youth.

I was elated that the words were flowing. So elated, I started sharing that first draft. Cringe. It's like the time you learn a new skill and want to show it to everyone, and they are either impressed with your bravery for trying something new or show way too many teeth, smiling with an expression that says: get me outta here. 

Writing a book reminds me of when I was first learning to ski... I thought I was flying down the hill faster than the speed of light only to have my Austrian instructor, dressed from head to toe in red, zoom past me, yodeling down the mountain. If yodels could sound like a mocking rant, then the red torpedo had it down cold. And here I was, again, strapping on my proverbial skis, learning how to create snow, mountains, other skiers, the barn one of the skiers in class skied into (seriously, how do you ski into a barn?) the sensation of gliding through the pines...all of it.

My first draft was finished, but I had no idea of the size of the monster I had written into existence...