Alexis Rey

I’ve been notably absent for weeks from here, but that’s because I’ve been in the throes of creative agony. I have been writing a book. It’s very ambitious of me, I know; in fact, I don’t even know what the fuck I’m playing at, if I’m honest. Every time I read a good book, I get itchy fingers and want to write a book myself, and then I realize that I have zero good ideas. I can babble on and on about my life on here ad nauseum, and to my friends on the phone, but when it comes to creating an original idea – bubkiss.

Two–or was it three?–years ago, I finally decided I’d write down what happened to us in immigration: the journey, the struggles, etc. That was painful, akin to giving birth, but it was almost finished and in editing as of a month ago.

That’s when it happened.

I found my diaries.

I mean, I didn’t find them, because I always had them. I used to keep diaries starting with when I was seven or eight, and until I was almost twenty one. Periodically, I pick them up and leaf through them. I did that.

It’s mostly silly at the beginning, exclamation points, and random doodles. But then around eleventh grade, suddenly, it gets very real. The writing gets mature, as does the thinking, in a very startling way. And as I sat there reading, the further I got into it, the more I thought, jeez, this reads like a novel. Like, I would want to read this book.

So, I decided to make it into one.

I was on vacation at the time. I don’t know how my husband and children didn’t kill me because I literally sat there and wrote for at least four hours a day. As a result, the project was fully written from beginning, to middle, to end, in less than six weeks.

The first project isn’t even done and buried yet! Now I have two I have to figure out what to do with!

It was exhausting.

That was a painful year in my life, and re-reading it, let alone re-creating it so that someone else can read it, was like getting into a time machine and getting on a loop trip of repeatedly stabbing myself in the heart. I was torn between feeling terrible for myself, and screaming at myself to smarten the fuck up.

Anyway, that left very little in the part of my brain reserved for effort or creativity to blog about anything.

I’ll try to be better.

And now that it’s written, I feel like I’m missing a wing or something. Or at least a limb. I feel like I need to write more, as if without a words being woven into a story, I’m somehow idle. But I’m back to realizing that other than babbling about my life, I have no good ideas. Even this book was in essence me babbling about my life. I read that everyone has but one story to tell, and I gotta wonder if this is THE one.

If it is, I hope it’s good!