Getting Older - Again

It's just about three weeks until my 31st birthday.

Now, I'm always introspective. I'm always taking an inventory of my life and weighing outcomes against expectations - especially lately. However, there's a special brand of self evaluation I do about this time every year. It's less about my frustrations and disappointments about life in general, but more about whether I've developed personally at all during the previous year.

Last year, I posted that my goal was to have an even better year creatively than last. I think I achieved that goal (we'll the zombie rock opera still needs completing). First of all, I'm writing more than ever. My hard drive is full of stories that need to be fleshed out and I've got notebooks full of ideas. And the great thing is, these ideas and stories aren't being abandoned like they usually are. I'm actually working at it. This is a huge deal to me.

And this stuff isn't just sitting in a file somewhere waiting for me to die. I'm submitting. I've had two 10 minute plays stage locally, the play in Singapore, and just saw closing night on my 45 minute one act just this past weekend. I'm working on an entry for another play festival in Australia and starting next month, I'll be sending some stories out to various magazines.

A friend of mine made an offhand comment a couple of weeks ago that you can't really call yourself a writer if you're not being published/paid for it. The comment wasn't really directed at me, but it's stuck with me. That's what this past year was for. I decided on my last birthday that I was either going to take this "hobby" to a different level, or I was going to stop spinning my wheels. It's been a decent start towards that goal.

I've mentioned in other posts that I've been reading Gibran's The Prophet lately. My copy of the book was given to me by Spinster, shortly after we became friends (I didn't realize until recently that I hadn't told her how many times I've read the book from cover to cover in the last four years). I'm not quite the type of person who draws wisdom from every page, but there's some damned good stuff in there on most of the subjects that bother us daily. It's good stuff.

If I concentrate on some of this stuff over the next year, who knows what the next birthday post will be like.