Courageous Creativity

My wife checked out a book from the library called Courageous Creativity; the tagline is Advice and Encouragement for the Creative Life. I've read the first 60 pages so far and it's really good. It's about encouraging you to use your creativity and create. For example, write.

I finally wrote the first chapter of my book down one week ago. This is a book that I've been working on in my head for years and years. Plotting out the characters, major events, major themes, that kind of thing. But only now am I starting to write it out. I also wrote the first little bit of chapter two as well.

Chapter 2

            Casey sat down on her couch.

            She opened her laptop and scanned her emails. Nothing new. That was worrisome. Casey stood up and paced around the living room of her apartment. How long had it been since she had heard from Harriet? Two weeks? Something was definitely wrong.

            She remembered the day she heard the news. She was sitting in that very room, working on her research into ancient civilizations, when one of her three roommates came in.

            “Casey,” she said, “you have to see this.”

            Casey sat up straighter. “What is it Nel?”

            Nel walked over to the coffee table and grabbed the TV remote. “Look,” Nel said, and turned on the TV.

            “—let it cook for fifty to fifty-five minutes,” the person on the TV was saying.

            “Huh?”

            “Shoot. Sorry,” Nel said, pulling up the channel guide. “It’s just that in movies and shows and such whenever a person has some news story to share, when they turn on the TV it’s automatically on the right channel.”

            The news station came up on the screen. It was currently in the middle of showing a Coca-Cola commercial.

            “And it always turns on right at the beginning of the news story the character was thinking about,” mumbled Nel, then turned off the TV. “Forget it, here, look.” She took out her phone and pulled up an article.

            Casey looked over at her roommates phone, and soon began to feel chill.

            That was three weeks ago.

I'm probably going to change the very beginning of that. Sitting down on a couch isn't that exciting. Anyway, that's my blog post for this week.