Day -8, and a Quote Worth Quoting

One of my favorite writing quotes:

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.  ~Toni Morrison

This is why (or a big reason why) I started writing. There were stories I wanted to read that I couldn't find on the bookshelves, so I decided to write them myself. In the fantasy novels I had read up to that time, wizards never got to fall in love. Or if they did, they never got to do anything about it. Kings and princes and warriors and farmboys-with-destinies, yes, but not wizards. And I thought that was unfair, so I decided to write a novel where a wizard got to have a romantic relationship. That's a little bit of what my very very first ever novel is about, and one day I will dust it off and give it a good revising and editing and set it loose into the world.

On the grander scale of things, what is there that won't be done if you don't do them? What songs won't be sung, pictures painted, blankets knitted, meals cooked, jokes told, smiles brought to someone's face, if you don't do it? Find that something, and do it.

So, yesterday, 1034 words written of a story that didn't exist before, and 1302 words today. I'm halfway through the next-to-last chapter of a story that languished for years as a couple of paragraphs and a few lines of dialogue. In a few more days, it will exist as a whole, new, complete thing (if in need of a good whipping-into-shape). There aren't a lot of things more satisfying than that.