Some mornings you’re still asleep but walking around, and some mornings you wake up and it’s easy to see the light and the colors and feel the life all around you. This has been my darkest winter yet, with even the slightest insult or inconvenience feeling like it’s enough to make me want to end it all, but life isn’t the same in winter.
Winter is not easy, it’s not for wimps, it’s not for the easily overwhelmed. Winter is when abundance is hidden from us, when it’s easy to forget that something could ever spring from nothing. It’s easy to forget how easy it is to grow or be nourished or to rest.
Winter is the oppression of routine, of gray skies that rarely change, a biting cold to greet you as soon as the door is opened–winter makes you pay for the breathtaking awe you feel in gazing out over blinding stretches of crystal and white.
But days change, and despite the fact that winter’s dominance is all encompassing and inescapable to those caught up in the worst of it, winter must still bow to time, and there will be those of us who will begin to stir and open our eyes from our caves just before winter is through.
I woke up today and realized how to move forward in my writing, and it feels like the sun on my face.
It feels like I’m at the last few inches of the last incline just before the finish line in a cross country race.
Oh snap–I know what my theme is!
When I did my first readthrough of my first draft, I knew that the wrench I needed to tighten up with was gonna be theme, but all the writing books I’ve been skimming, all the exercises had me feeling like theme had to be this laser-precise mission statement statement that could sum up the whole 300 pages into one perfect sentence and that’s really not true . . . that’s really not what theme is or what it has to be.
My book is about having to settle for less in order to fit in to a society that you resent–simple as that.
Yes, it is still about feminine dominance in a world ruined by a man-made atrocity, still about a Man’s struggle to finding a meaningful job and friendship and possibly a relationship in a world where all of these things are discouraged or outright denied to his male brethern, but this book–keeping in mind that this is a series– this book is about having to settle for less, to oppress your own talents or intellect or spirit or experience in order just to survive in a harsh and unyielding world. and just knowing that, just realizing that, I already see EXACTLY what’s wrong with my rewrite.
So now I have to say this just like a little kid who got the clothes instead of the toys for christmas from their crazy uncle lou — Thank you Terry Bain 
His article, “Theme is what unifies your story” in this month’s The Writer magazine sees theme as being much more general than what many writing books want you to arrive at and for some reason, it “clicked” for me, but not until I had some time to sleep on it.
or at least until I had time to get over my own egotistical prejudice in believing that there’s anything any outside writer from that hoity-toity society of the already published that could help me.
So, time and kids permitting, I have a fresh day to get my writing back on track.
and seeing how it’s taken me 2 1/2 hours to write even this much, I think the “kids” part isn’t going to be very permitting today.
But a bear’s gotta forage for what they can when they wake up before the thaw.
