Two days in a row - Go Me!

So I was driving on my usual "I need to get out of the house before I go crazy route" tonight, doing a little metacognition. I was thinking about my writing and I realized that I write about death a lot. Does that make me horribly morbid? I don't think so.

One of the things they (ah the ubiquitous "they") teach in any beginning creative writing class is to write what you know. Don't set your story in Mozambique if you have never been there (unless you do some amazing research). Well, I have known a lot of death in my life, both literally and figuratively speaking. So I write about it a lot, literally and figuratively.

But to take it even a step further, from the Christian point of view, death is not the end of the story. Where there is death, there is also resurrection, new life, new beginning. And even though I sometimes don't want that kind of positive resolution to my stories (because one of the other things they teach is that tension and...unsettledness is important in good writing), it always seems to come out that way. I have just come to resign myself to the fact that no matter how much I fight it, no matter how depressed I am, no matter how much I want to write angsty, depressing, "artistic" stuff, at heart I'm just an incurable optimist. So much for being a dark, brooding artist, suffering for my craft.

Oh, tomorrow I'm going to post a part of a short story I've been working on. I'd do it tonight, but I'm still fiddling with the part that's done, and I have one more scene clearly in my mind that I want to add before I post it. So, ciao until then.