Blast from the past

DH and I are welcoming a new member of the family...

A new computer!

I'm astounded to say that I'm at a point in my life where a computer is now part of my business. I used to consider writing a hobby, but that's no longer the case. Regardless, now that our new darling is on its way, it means I have to go through and organize my old files for transfer.

To say there are some old memories there is an understatement.

But I did find this funny little snippet. It's actually from the college application essay I submitted when I was applying to get into the school's creative writing program. The essay asked me about my plans for the future and how my writing factored into those plans.

I was rereading the essay, looking back fondly on the girl I had been, glad to see the same optimism and trust in humanity's capacity for good, amused by my blind faith in the path I had set for myself in stone, and I stumbled upon this paragraph:

I love to write tales in which the lines of good and evil aren't so clear, where redemption may or may not be possible, where sometimes you must accept the bad times along with the good. I believe the reason life is so hard is so we learn something from our brief time on earth.  Mother Theresa was right. God never gives us more than we can handle; although, sometimes we wish that He didn't trust us so much. This belief is infused solidly into my writing. While my stories may not end happily, there is always something in the story that lends itself to the theory of redemption and unconditional love. If my readers think about these questions, then my fiction has had the desired effect.

Well, shit...

That is my writing in a nutshell, spoken in the words of a high school senior who was positive she would live her life for her characters and stories. Almost a decade after I wrote this (not quite a decade, but close!), while I muddle through the world of author branding, the necessary but horrendous popularity contest that is Facebook, and my own struggles to define why I write what I write, I discover that that girl from my past had known all along.