One Billion

Thats BILLION, with a B. A big fat B. That I am honestly happy to say is how much J.K. Rowling is worth these days. For those of you living under a rock, this is the woman who writes the Harry Potter books. This is a woman who less than 20 years ago was apparently living on wellfare. This is a woman who has not even published her 7th book yet. That's right, she has written five books. Just five. Thats somewhere around 167 million dollars per book. Granted there were movies and all sorts of other things that she got paid for but it was the books that made all that other stuff possible. An average author pumps out a book a year. Six years of work. One billion dollars. Granted, it's not about the money. I'm just glad to see that literature can still make that kind of money. People still read. This woman is a phenomenon, an incredible writer, and one of my heroes. Way to go J.K!

On another note, I am 24 years old today. That's almost a quarter of a century. It's been a good 24 years. I'm looking forward to all the ones coming up. The next few years should be very interesting.

For all of you who are interested, my writing course is going well. I just finished the first week and completed two writing assignments. These were sort of getting to know you type assignments but in some ways rather enlightening. I've made some good progress in understanding and getting past some of the issues that have been holding me back for the past few years. I've gotten some very positive feedback too. That always helps.

Here's a little story to describe my current writing position.

For the past three years it seems like I've been sitting in a room that was dark and empty of everything but me. I was left only with my thoughts. I had good ideas for writing. They would pop out of my head and fly around the room with the type of energy all new ideas seem to have but as they kept bouncing off of walls, floor, and ceiling they began to get tired. They needed to escape, to run free, but they couldn't even find a chink in my walls to squeeze through. I sat on the floor and watched these ideas, one by one, tire themselves out and drop to the floor. There they lay, drying out and shriveling up until I could no longer bear to look at them. This happened often enough so that I would try to stop creating them. I couldn't stand to watch them die. They lay there on the cold stone floor looking at me with such scrutiny and distaste. They seemed to constantly ask why I would be so cruel as to create them, these partial unfinished beings, only to lock them in a box and watch them suffocate. I think I was suffocating with them. Now there is light in my dark little cell. The mortar began to crumble out of the cracks a few months back and since then a window to the outside world has openned up. It gets bigger every day. Soon the walls will crumble, the ceiling will fall in, and the earth will reclaim this sad little floor I've been sitting on. The wind will blow all of my dead little stories away. They'll scatter all across the little valley outside my window and decompose back to where they came from. In time they'll be reborn, pure, in a way that they never were when I forced them together from mismatched bits and pieces. Their life will be stronger. It will be free. Once the hole in this wall gets a little bigger I'll be able to squeeze out of it and go wherever I want. There will be no limits. Maybe every now and then I'll come back to look at my sad little box, or what remains of it, just to remind myself of what I've inflicted on myself in the past. This is where I am now. I can see the light.

Also, on another subject, the honeybees have all been dying. I don't know if no one has noticed or if no one really cares but this seems like a bad omen to me. Doesn't it? They seem to be responsible for quite a lot of pollinating and things of that nature. I'm fairly certain that there are a lot of plants that need these services in order to propagate. They scary part is that so far as I've heard, they can't figure out why it's happening. Apparently it's not just a few either. Hives, by the hundreds, that were thriving a few months ago are dead. Most of the bees are not even around. Most of them are just gone. I only heard one little story about this on NPR a month or so ago and I've only heard someone else mention it once. Does this seem like a pretty bad thing to anyone else? If anyone has heard anything else about this I'd like to know. Drop me a line.

As always, thanks for reading.
Have an excellent weekend.