Worse than failure

I’m scrolling through the playlist on our TV, looking for something to watch, when a new series catches my eye.

The title is ‘Reverie’ and it’s about a somewhat broken/grieving FBI trained agent who is hired to rescue people who have become trapped in a virtual-reality constructed world known as, ‘Reverie’. At this point I don’t have to read anymore…because I know this story. In fact, I wrote this story when I was sixteen.

And this has nothing to do with plagiarism or me finally taking the deep dive off of reality pier. It’s true. When I was a teenager, I wrote five chapters about a world where people had become so addicted to virtual reality many couldn’t escape it and the main character was an FBI agent (practically a clone of Fox Mulder because X files was my LIFE back then) assigned to enter the mindscapes of these individuals and get them out alive.

Seeing that TV synopsis had me scrambling to find that old and mouldy printed copy of a book I started to write all those years ago, but never finished. For a clueless teenager who had yet to make so many mistakes and terrible life choices, those chapters were still pretty good!

I guess the moral of THIS story is that – the Muse doesn’t hang around forever. She will visit you with inspiration and give you a fair chance to muck around with an idea and bring it to life but she won’t wait indefinitely. Eventually when she senses your hesitance, when she sees you’re not ready, she will go plant that story seed in someone else’s head. Hopefully, somewhere it will thrive and grow.

So, my advice to all the would-be writer’s, is not to be a foolish old woman like me, who told her mom she wanted to be a writer when she was five but only managed to beat her demons down long enough to try writing again when she was forty.

Don’t try ‘a little’, don’t ‘give it a go’, don’t be timid and anxious and half-hearted. If this is something you know you want to do, give it EVERY..DAMN…THING…YOU GOT. Throw you heart and soul into the effort. Barter with every demon, crush every doubt, ignore every naysayer and critic you meet. And I say all of this simply because – although failure may sting like a bitch, REGRET is far, far worse.