Inspiration

This week, overall has been one of these:

I've had it reaffirmed to me why I don't generally spend much time watching or reading the news. It's just so incredibly depressing. This week I read about a man who massacred 77 people and thinks he deserves a metal for it, a man [suspected of killing his wife] who blew up his house and his sons in a suicide double murder, a quote by a woman getting a divorce that read "the marriage ran its course" [as if marriage is a disease], yet another person declaring that their religious beliefs and their political beliefs have nothing to do with each other, and the list goes on and on.
As positive and optimistic as I try to be, some days it's hard not to get dragged down by all the negative things that I see. We live in a depressing world.

Thankfully, though, that's not the only adjective I would use to describe it.

As I mentioned last time I posted, I am participating in a writing contest that is still ongoing. We've gone through the initial cut and 2 challenges thus far and somehow I'm still hanging in there. Poor Tim has been wonderful, enduring my panic attacks and freak outs at every submission deadline, always telling me that, no, my entry doesn't suck. He's fabulous. This experience, though the contest is nothing very formal or prestigious, has been a growing experience for me. The challenges have been tough and somewhat bizarre and forced me out of my writing comfort zone. The most amazing feeling though, is seeing my entries passed along each week and knowing that means that people actually voted for what I wrote. They liked it. For someone who's only ever tentatively shared her writing with classmates and close friends, it's an amazing feeling. It makes me want to keep trying, to keep pushing myself because maybe what I'm doing isn't a total waste of time.

Geek-out time:

This week, Tim and I moved date night up to Thursday for a surprise. UVU was having a date night event for students centered around
That's right. A Harry Potter movie night complete with blankets and pillows spread throughout the ballroom it was being shown in, HP-related refreshments like pumpkin pasties, cockroach clusters, and butter beer. Before going in to the "theatre" you could spin a wheel to get "sorted" into a house [I was sorted into Ravenclaw and Tim got put in Slytherin]. I was happily surprised at the number of people that came and it made me smile when everyone clapped and cheered for Mrs. Weasley and Neville. Basically, it was a total BLAST! I laughed, I cried, I geeked-out. sigh. I really am going to force my children to read this series.

Maybe the best thing about the night though, was how much watching that movie made me want to write. I left the movie last night with this absolute burning desire to create something. To be able to write characters as amazing as Snape, Dumbledore, and others. I want that so bad I can't even articulate it properly! haha. I talked to Tim about it and how I felt like I could never do something that incredible and he reminded me that the only person saying that was me :)
It's frightening though, some of you may know, to look to someone that you respect and admire so much, someone who has so much talent and has used it in such breathtaking ways as J.K. Rowling has. It's scary to look at that and want to experience it because where you see your role models today is so far from where you are at the moment. The mountain seems insurmountable.
The important part is that you can climb it.

Really though, this week J.K. Rowling has been my inspiration. I watched this video

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

this week and I was surprised to learn about certain aspects of her life that I had not known before. Wanting so badly to write something good, it was encouraging for me to hear her talk about how, when she was at her lowest point and began really focusing on the book series that would make her famous, she didn't know if anyone would like it. She didn't know if it would be published. She didn't know how long the tunnel was or when, if ever, it would end.

I may never write the next Harry Potter, or anything particularly famous. I can't see into the future. All I can do is what I do now.