The (outdoor) Writing Life

I love this writing life. The best part of writing stories; fiction and creative nonfiction, I get to live my life twice. When I wrote last week’s column about fishing I spent hours thinking and writing about my family summer vacations as a kid. Much of what I thought about and wrote didn’t make it into the final version, however, I called my sister and brother to ask what they remembered about summer vacations and lack of fishing on these vacations.


The story I’ve been working on for the last few weeks and sending to a few magazines is Steamboat Stories. I read it in Writer’s Group today and love remembering these stories from one of the years I lived in Steamboat Springs: skiing with friends and Olympians, closing day at the mountain and getting silly (skiing with a backpack filled with beer, who does this?). I only remember the good times.

I vaguely remember the bad or difficult times for these stories. Maybe I’ll use them in a fiction novel when I’m old and bitter; not there yet.

Writing is hard and it doesn’t pay the mortgage. It’s okay. Tomorrow I’ll be at it again, writing as much as I can squeeze in, submitting stories to literary magazines with the hope they will say YES!, and trying to get to work on time.

“Do you know how lucky you are? You're a writer. You get to live life twice. Who else can do that?” Dawson’s Creek (Love this Show)