Bucket Lists.

I don't really have a 'Bucket List' per se. I've never sat down and penned a list of things I need to do before: before I am 35, before I retire, before my kids leave the nest, before I die. Maybe I'm just not mentally organized to work in that fashion? But I do know there are things I've always dreamed of doing and goals I have for my life, and some of those are more of the pie-in-the-sky variety than others.

Among those, sitting near the top as a dream I've had for years, is the one where I write a book and get it published.

I've always been a writer. As a teenager, I spent hours upon hours writing poetry and prose in a little floral-covered notebook I owned. It looked like a regular hardback, so I chose it because it was easily camouflaged among the other books in my room and thus not such an easy target for older brothers who I knew would use whatever I put in it as ammunition to embarass me. I even won a few writing recognitions in school, including a poem I wrote titled 'Angel Dust' which was then refused for publication by my high school because it 'could have been a drug reference'. (For the record, I was way too sheltered as a teenager to even realize that angel dust was PCP....my art teacher actually had to explain it to me.)

As a professional, I'm known as 'the girl with the red pen' in my office. My boss and co-workers are always coming to me to review, revise, and red-mark the things they write, from Board Meeting notes to grant proposals to newsletter articles. And then there is this little corner of the world, which started as a way to document the hard facts of parenting and has slowly morphed into my place to spit out all the thoughts and memories and stories that pop into my mind throughout the day.

I've started and grown tired of several books in my lifetime. I get an idea, start to write, and then get bored or start to feel it's too forced. Or I lose confidence and then never go back to writing until I'm over the storyline, then revisit it and read it with embarassment.

But this time, something is different. I am writing a book. It's weird how inspiration hits, but I was listening to conservative talk radio (hey, you gotta know the opposition's views, right?) on my way home from work when a story came on that blew my mind. It had me thinking and suddenly I couldn't wait to get home and write the story that my mind was developing.

So, last night I wrote 3 chapters. And the story is still unfolding in my mind, but I'm feeling excited just to write something that's not autobiographical. After all, my life isn't all that interesting really, so it's fun to create a world in a story that IS interesting. Or so I hope!

Here's hoping that someone else (please, universe, let it be a publisher!) likes it as much as I do!