The Introduction

I'd like to call myself a writer, a literature caterpillar if you will. I've yet to metamorphosise into a published butterfly although I desire to be a brilliant fluttering author, or even not so brilliant. It is writing and it's important I have the notion firmly cemented that not everyone is going to get what I am trying to convey when I put pen to paper. I do not take rejection very well, it stabs at the very depths of my ego. It's the reason why I never pursued an acting or dancing career. I could look at writing as words put together to make up a story, of fact or fiction but I can not bring myself to do so. Every time I write, whether it be a story, a poem or an essay I take a small piece of my soul and put it between the spaces of the words, amongst the periods and commas and in betwixt and between the paragraph breaks. I carry a feeling through the whole piece when I write, it spills out of me like blood from a wound and there is a rhythmic sense of purpose to display the moment in my head to the world and have it be recognized. I write for myself because it lets me discharge the overwhelming electricity that builds up in my mind but I also write because I want to know that someone, somewhere feels the things that I do. Even if the story is pure fiction with made up characters, like my idea of a series of children's books about a little boy who grew up in the Kalahari Desert. Reading "The Kalahari Kid", you would see no reference to my life but it's there. As a young girl I sustained my inner bookworm reading
English authors such as; Rohl Dahl, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Kingsley and Kenneth Grahame . The style in which they wrote is ever present in my writing. The way these novelists viewed the world and how they wrote about it influenced my own world. You wouldn't know that I grew up in Africa as a little girl myself but I did and the mischief that little Tobbee would get up to in my stories would stem from my experience of growing up as a child in Africa. Unless I write an essay that is purely about a topic of fact, which personally I find very dull, every creative nuance that I put forth is somehow and some way gleaned from me personally. If I look at it even more obsessively even the manner and style of how I write a fact based piece is a method to be conceived and weighed. This all proves that if I want to be a writer I must embrace my fear of rough drafts and my disdain for red pens marks however for me writing will always be organic, therapeutic and transient. I will at one point have my work assessed by my peers, strangers, editor or even maybe a publisher but when I write, it is me and beautiful, bountiful words to which the possibilities are endless. Writing is like all art, it is infinite, just like there is a painting that has yet to be painted, or a dance yet to be choreographed there isa story, a book or a poem that has yet to be written and once it has been it is mine and no one else can write it.