22 Sept 2023
Dear Friend,

I hit a milestone yesterday. I can officially hand you a stack of a 187 pages that you can read start to finish. Although there may be some little flaws and strings that need to be tightened, it will make sense as a story. You won’t be completely confused or lost. You will come with me on a little journey and be able to tell me what happened start to finish. This is a major victory for a woman who six and a half months ago only had dream of writing a book. And I have been writing a book since then so it is no longer just a dream. I have 900 pages of words. The whole bunch is a mess of pretty beads strung together on a weak and fraying string. It’s shoved together in chunks and parts could disappear or destroy the others. So my mission this month was the clean up the first part. The first 100-200 pages needed to be completed as a stand alone book. Part one or book one of a longer saga. I needed to simplify and give myself limits for my own sanity and to make actual progress towards finishing something. I could easily have kept writing until I drowned in an ocean of almost attached puzzle pieces. I was wise enough to realize I needed to choose something simple and doable to focus on. The first part of the book felt the least exciting to me. It gets juicier and more wild in the my imagination as the story unfolds. I also felt the first part of the book was more pin-down-able. It was more from my real life facts. I felt I could follow a trail of memories and just write them down. This is how I held my own hand through the process of learning how to write a book. Unsure where to start, I started with what I understood and what I could see clearly in front of me. My memories were showing themselves to me loud and clear. So I just wrote them down. Done. 187 pages of my memories with minimal embellishment. This is what happened, as I’ve told it before and as I would keep on telling it for generations…

Until today…

I saved a copy of the original memory and I opened up a new document. My test today was to see if I could translate the original memory into a brand new fantasy. The written memory is the template for the story. Now I actually have a cohesive start to finish story and I can get wild with the details and the telling of it. I can’t even begin to tell you how uncomfortable it was for me to exist for months writing a book without knowing what story I was telling. I was just a well of water pouring and gushing with no sense of where the ocean was. I had to drain the words out with faith that they would go somewhere, find their own way. Some words, the first group of them, have successfully made it to the estuary! Before we send them out to sea, it’s time for me to polish them up into something I actually want to push out into the world.

As an artist, this is a very enjoyable moment. I get to be on the edge of my seat with curiosity and discovery. I am watching something brand spanking new be born to life before my eyes today. With the pressure of figuring out the story lifted from my shoulders, now I get to play with words and just take this story and make it as fun as I possibly can. To translate this for my fellow musicians…

The song is written. We know the lyrics and the basic melody. We’ve chosen the key and the BPM. We have our core instruments ready to hold down the fort. Now, let’s play! What else can we add in to spice it up? What little trills and doodles can we toss around to liven it up. What if we swapped a word or two or changed the key mid-song. Now….now it’s getting really interesting.

Love & Rainbows,
Cha Wilde

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Dear Friend, You Can Read 187 Pages