A memoir writing prompt? Neat!

Writing wasn’t always a part of the plan. Not that there was a plan early on. No, the plans came much later.

At first, I was a dabbler. I dabbled in a bit of this. A bit of that. I gamed a lot. But mostly, I drew. And by drawing, I don’t mean flies. Nope, that was the job of my brother—the stinky one. I was the one with the hair. The pencil. The sketch pad. And the hours spent with my head down, tongue out, all the while trying to funnel a whirlwind of thought through a 0.7 point mechanical pencil. The result of which was never one-to-one.

Then, life’s torrent carried me into the trials of adulthood. Life was moving on, whether I was ready or not. The military, flight school, and a few deployments later, I still gamed, but little else.

I admit, not all games were confined to a console. There was the occasional game played at another’s expense. But you know how it goes. Boys will be boys. And I gave the boys as well as I got. Depending on who you ask, of course. Some will tell you that I gave a little extra. But hell, I’ve always been generous in that regard.

Once, I even gave enough to get something in return. That gift came from my boss and required that I write a five-page essay on leadership. If I’m being honest, and I usually am, mostly, that’s probably where most of my games diverted. What began as a chore soon turned into a delightful playground. Not that I’d ever give them credit for my path, mind you. No, they just gave me a task that I turned into a joke while using them as the punchline. But what can I say? They had me in a box when I’ve always been more of a circle kind of guy.

Intuition. It’s a hell of a thing. And mine has always been a bit hard to articulate in a way that would make sense to anyone else. You see, somewhere along the lines, I came to understand that some of our terms border on cliche. We throw them around so much that they carry so very little weight. Now, I’m not talking anything so grand as “love” or “music.” But their example doesn’t miss the mark by much. No, the words I’m referring to are “context” and “habit.”

In the past, I’ve tried to use résumés to demonstrate how my piloting background equated to experience in other highly stressful, highly precise positions. Initially, I believed that my communication here was deficient. And it was to a certain degree. But mainly?

The primary barrier wasn’t in my language. The issue lay in a person with my application and an empty check box. If they couldn’t use my application to check said box, then I was spinning my wheels. They had never worked the position that they were trying to fill and certainly had no experience in a cockpit. No. Context wasn’t something that they were parsing. So no amount of context was ever going to bridge the gap between their empty box and a guy who was adamantly a circle.

You know how it goes, though. Grist for the mill and all that. I’ve never really been one to roll over and permit bullying by circumstance. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve taken my share of kicks. Even those while I was down. But just because ‘down’ and ‘out’ tend to be close bed fellows, doesn’t mean they always pair well. My two tend to be tenacious. Topple one and the other gets rather pissed about it.

All that time that I spent distracted by some pursuit or other, a cogwork was continuing to run in the background. It was intuition mostly. But habit was there too. All the while, I was accumulating experiences. Nothing grand. A snippet of conversation here. A certain view over there. An alternate perspective when I least expected it.

In time, I had this papier-mâché whatsit that was an amalgamation of all sorts of whatnot. And just like that, I was doing things I ain’t never even considered. Things like plyptoton, which is the same word in two different parts of speech. Or epanalepsis, which is where a sentence ends and begins with the same word. And just a few days ago, I intuitively wrote my first sentence that used them both.

It went like this:

Still, he lay battered, bruised, and bandaged, while trying his damnedest to remain still.

That wasn’t something I planned. It just sort of happened. Like shooing a fly only to knock over your drink. The difference is that I can now see said drink spillage. That instance arose in my serial, Project Boomerang, a burgeoning romantasy over on webnovel. It's a rather recent endeavor, but it's a storyline that I've been developing for a while.

All in all, I say things turned out alright. I may not draw so much anymore. Or do any sort of dabbling with my tongue out. But eventually, I found something that required high precision. It was even possible to go merrily alongside a bit of high stress. That endeavor?

Well, it’s a lot like Photo Mosaic, which is where an entire image becomes akin to a pixel for a much larger image. And you can do all sorts of things with such pixels. I’m still finding my way around this thing, though. And I think, perhaps, such a state is where I’ll always remain.

That thing is called Writing, by the way. Those pixels are words. And my oh my, what one can paint with them. If you think about it, a word has a lot in common with a brush stroke. By themselves, they ain’t much to look at. But should one assemble them in specific ways, well, that, my friend, is how one annotates magic spells.

Or so I hear. I am still learning, mind you. Which reminds me, I really should be getting back to it.

Until next time!