Turning The Page

Somewhere back there in the past week or so, this blog ran on past the four thousand post mark. I have commemorated plenty of the milestones achieved here, so I won't belabor the obsessive-compulsive streak on exhibit at this web address. Instead, I want to briefly marvel at the number of pages that is. For presentation's sake, let's say that there is a nicely laid out post per page. Four thousand pages puts me in a Stephen King league, although I don't tend to crank these tomes out over breakfast as Maine's favorite citizen seems to. It took me years to climb that hill, and from way up here I can see those below me, who scramble to keep a page or two together, or change media or method to try and find just the right fit. There are so many ways to put your thoughts and words out into the world these days, it can be a little intimidating.
Or freeing.
When I was a much younger man, sending publishers my stories and poems along with self-addressed stamped envelopes, I dreamed of a life when those envelopes would be returned with not just acceptance but with cash. Wads and wads of money to make the effort that put each syllable in some sort of equation that was understandable. I was going to be a writer. I was going to be an author. I was going to get paid to write. It was going to be my life's work. That was the direction I was driving in my twenties. I wanted to get to live in a place where I knew where my typewriter was and there would be someone else in charge of finding a place to put all those wonderful ideas that came pouring out of that office. In exchange for the previously mentioned wads of cash. That would be my agent. My literary agent. I could afford to have such a person in my employ because I had run out of things to spend my wads of cash on and needed to hire someone to look after the way that the money rolled in.
I truly believed that it would be just a matter of time before the world beat a path to my artistic door and started begging me for more clever bits of scribbling. Then, somewhere around the time I turned forty, the dream got put in a box and the real life closed in a little tighter. I was going to have to work at a job that didn't necessarily involve enthralling readers to make ends meet until my big break. I was going to have to be something other than what I am, technically: a published author. That doesn't mean I stopped putting words together. On the contrary. In many ways I am more prolific now than I ever was back when I aspired to be a full-time writer. Something about being able to create in the empty spaces life affords me makes it so much more special.
Like that four thousandth blog - whatever it was. It was a celebration.
And so is this.