Shawn L. Bird

“The odd sense of calm with which he’d waked was still with him.  Something had changed in the night. Maybe it was sleeping…among the ghosts of his own future.”

Diana Gabaldon

Written in My Own Heart’s Blood.

These lines resonated with me.  While the character in this scene is being literal, I think we sleep among the ghosts of our own futures on a frequent basis.  For example, you know how they say men carry within them the seeds of their own destruction.  The ‘hamartia’ or fatal flaw of literary characters occur within our real lives, and who we will be is created by the decisions that we make.

Destinations require both journeys and beginnings.  We go to bed with a decision, and we rise with a spectre of our future self as a result.

I suppose this also works in reverse.  If we have a ‘someone’ we want to be, we can only get there by the conscious and sub-conscious decisions we make toward that image of ourselves. Just like if you want to be a teacher, you volunteer with kids, graduate from high school, study at university, so there are steps to every image.

If you want to write a book some day, sit today and pound out two hundred words.  Tomorrow pound out five hundred.  Get your rhythm,  Keep writing.  Eventually you will have a book, and eventually, you will have readers.