I want to write something honest. I want to uncork the bottle that Jeremy filled up. I want to stare out a window and do that legato slide from content to complex. I want to write something real, something major, something that doesn’t ice skate or dilly dally or dance across the surface of the stream.  

I want to wade through the river with soggy socks because barefootedness has been done before and it wasn’t slippery enough.
I want soul wrinkles, and I want my writing to have them too. I want to decide, honestly, between going to my first ever cool-kid party or staying home curled up with The Book Thief with tears pooling on the pillow case from character loss. l want to recreate that moment of self-actualization where I finally commit to being  an introvert, but that’s ok because all my beloved characters are.

I’m better at “me.” I’m better at writing a rhetorically sound version of my vulnerability, but it’s hard to translate it into fiction. Honest fiction. It almost sounds like a paradox, but I promise it’s real. The fiction that stuck to me like push pins growing up. The fiction that could produce just as much rawness as an actual moment in time.

I believe there is truth in fiction and my project for the summer is trying to find it. And I’m scared because I believe that involves being bad at something, publicly, but I think there’s something honest in that too. I feel like it’s time that I fill that blank notebook that has become the guiding metaphor for myself.

And so I’m actually enlisting you, my generous, supportive readers. You have encouraged me through the many stages of this little blog (underlined and linked). If anyone is interested in reading some of my fictional samples and offering me feedback–helping me find the honesty in fiction that I struggle with–please respond on Facebook in the comment section below my link and I will send some of my samples over. I’m a bit scared, but that feels honest too.