This is my 50th post.
Took a few years but I got here.
I’ve been working on updating things around here in this bit of my virtual universe. Finally getting the site updated, adding a not so desperate plea for people to sign up for email, changing out photos, that sorta thing.
Decided it was time to update the about page. I hated the blurb when I originally created and posted it over three years ago but I was standing firm on perfect being the enemy of the good and just got the damn thing done and up. I knew I wasn’t going to like it no matter how much I agonized.
So I started writing a new about blurb and as often happens the damn thing grew beyond its original purpose. So now it’ll be my 50th post and an edited version will be the new about page.
Two for the price of one!
About D.G. Reid
I don’t remember a time before I could read.
Not that I’m so freakin’ brilliant, just that my memory sucks, and doesn’t, in weird, horrible and wonderful ways.
I remember riding in the back of the family station wagon and watching Dad #2 back into a telephone pole as no one would listen to me as I tried to warn him. I remember the sudden in-rush of exhaust as the window shattered into a million pieces all over me. That’s a suck ass of a moment to have to remember all these years later.
But then it’s balanced with standing in a field in Turkey. The air was just on the cold side of chill but not enough to be uncomfortable while bundled up. The grass in the field was brown and sighing in the wind. I could smell coal smoke in the distance as the muezzin called the faithful to prayer as the sun started to set and cast everything from the dead grass, to the people I was traveling with, to the old Roman ruin we had hurried to reach before it closed, with an amber glow that turned everything a beautiful warm shade of gold. It was, as Spalding Grey named it, a Perfect Moment.
With my head full of the above sorts of memories it’s no wonder I have no idea when I started to decipher the squiggly lines on a page and derive meaning from them.
I’ve spent a substantial part of my life reading. Always have. Hopefully always will.
I started dancing with the muse just as I became a teenager. I have what is termed a severe sequential processing deficit in regards to language, math and other linear processes. The person who tested me figured the reason my language skills were so wonky is that I memorized the English language because the structure behind it was, is, incomprehensible. Good for vocabulary, bad for diagramming and grammar. Guess I just didn’t have enough words at my fingertips before I was 13 to be able to form a sentence that could actually convey some deeper meaning.
The first poem I remember writing was about/to a boy named Danny. He had brown curly hair and one blue eye and one green. He was my first hard crush that I got to act on.
My life blew apart shortly thereafter. No idea what happened to the physical manifestation of the poem but I’ll always have the memory of pouring a bit of myself through the pen and onto the pages of a composition book just like I’m doing with the first draft of this particular bit of me.
I wrote a lot through high school. Even attended a program for it in between regular high school and work. Students always explained it as kinda like Fame, but not. I was in the first class of the Poetry/Prose department. The program was so new we didn’t even have a classroom. We met in the lighting booth of the theater. The stairs up and down were a nightmare but it felt very special being isolated up in the tower of a former synagogue.
Writing gave me a place to dump all my thoughts and feelings so they didn’t all come oozing out through my ears.
So many things to process.
Received a national award for a short-short story I’d written. While doing a reading of the third chapter of a fantasy book I was plowing through creating, an editor for a major NYC publishing house handed me her card and told me to send her the full draft once it was finished.
I never wrote another word in that universe.
During college I was busy writing other things and didn’t have time for anything other than the occasional poem. As a history major, if you learn nothing else, you at least learn how to bang out the pages.
After college came kids and when they were little I was so busy figuring out how to be a mother there was no brain space for anything else. Not even me.
As they aged I picked up the composition book and pen. Brought dreams and nightmares to life and talked with friends old and new about writing again.
And then my life blew apart again. It happens. Sometimes more often than not, or more often than we’d like. I do what I can to minimize it. Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
And then I got sick and wanted to die but didn’t. Writing helped me hang on to what little bit of sanity I had left.
I wrote 97,000+ words in The Tome. When I couldn’t stand being in this world I had that one to retreat to. Three final chapters to go and I chucked the entire thing and started over again with an outline, character sketches and a blank page.
And then it happened again.
But here I still am. Figuring it out on my own and not feeling especially successful at the moment but still moving forward even if sometimes I take the long way around.
Words are the only thing that has always been there. Whether my own or another’s.
I string words across the page and try to bring order to my chaos.
Welcome to the journey.
It’s nice to have some company.
