life lessons

There was a girl with strawberry blond hair woven into a braid that hung down the length of her back. Her blue eyes reflected the sky and absorbed everything beneath it as she sat next to the window in the school bus talking about Supergirl and Wonder Woman. About Spiderwoman and Batgirl and how Huntress had the best superhero costume because she wore a purple suit with a super cool mask.She kept her hands tucked under the school bag on her lap. Kids are less likely to make fun of what they can’t see and this girl knew all about that, so her hands stayed hidden. If they had eight fingers and two thumbs like everyone else's, it’d be different. She couldn’t conceal them all the time, but learning how to avoid drawing attention to them became second nature. A word like "syndactyly" was too strange and confusing for the first grade.Every day, we hopped off the bus at the...

I've always had a complicated relationship with writing desks. It seems absurd to say such a thing, because a writing desk is an inanimate object and therefore indifferent, which should make having a relationship with it anything but complicated.But, for writers, or anyone who spends several hours creating at a desk every day, that relationship is important. You have to be able to live together in harmony. Perhaps it's this way with a musician and their instrument. Maybe even more so for them, as they tend to travel with the inanimate object they're having a relationship with, and I generally do not lug my desk along when I travel. Sure, I'm bogged down with pens, notebooks, and tablet, but that's another story altogether.Where I get my real writing done, my final drafts, submissions, blogging, publishing, all happens here, at my very small, very cheap, and very reliable little desk. But it wasn't always this way.My first desk was a thing...

Tag: life lessons

There Was a Girl

I Finally Understand What Stephen King Was Saying About His Desk