What would you do?

It is the new buzz word - or should I say sentence. What would you do if you were not afraid. I like to think I am not - I guess man or woman, we all do. But my answer to that question would not come blank for me - at all. And it is not being afraid because I am a woman, it is really because life can pose a threat big enough to some less expected things.

The one that comes to mind today is 'I would write my book'. Note that I did not say I would write 'a' book but 'my' book. In fact I should probably even say 'one of them'. I think i have started 3 real ones by now, and 2 have a decent shot as well. But the reality I face is - what if no one wants to read it? Who will want to read what I have to say? 

When I was a kid, I would write a ton of poetry. I wrote the first poem on record about the moon and the stars and as I received some first prize on my fourth grade, my parents found out about it. For many years, no matter what I bought as a gift for my dad at Christmas, birthdays or father's day - the best gift I could give him would always be a couple of verses written by me. The only painful part would be that he would read them outloud proudly, which I hated because I would always expect someone in the room to make a joke. 

I went through my passionate teens writing frantically and I had probably accumulated 300 poems by age 18. Once, I applied to a national competition and as I asked my dad's assistant for help in producing the 3 copies needed, story says my dad made an extra copy for him just in case. Another time that I wrote a short comic theatre all in verse for school, my dad took it to a theatre producer who was apparently very complimentary of it. And he went on for a few years asking if he could publish the 'clandestine' copy he had of the poems he once copied - he would pay for it. That was the last thing I wanted - my dad paying for something no one would ever read. It was still pretty cool of him though. 

At some point, I don't recall why, i turned poems into prose. Who knows why. And that became something much harder to accomplish. Writing for me is very easy. But a book is a much more complex machine than a 20 verse poem - moreover, a book is for others to read, while poems feel more like a burst of emotions that is spread out and done in a page, almost like therapy. So I started them, full of good intentions but never passed the 20% of each, even though I knew the full story. Not even when my single manuscript of a piece of one of them got stolen did I wake up to reality and progressed what I had so far. 

I blame it on time, but really?