It’s not a New Year’s resolution….it’s soaring off a cliff, my wings spread wide. 2017 will be when I finally settle into writing in earnest…after yearning to for so many years. I joined the writing community of Medium this year and it has added rocket fuel to my resolve.  I am sharing an exchange I had in October with the magnificent Oliver Shiny because it needs to be together in its entirety and because every time I read it….it fires me up anew. Links to his writing at the end.

OLIVER:(responding to someone else’s story)

Fuck, I hate people like you, because if you wrote this at twenty-four, and in the face of ennui as you’re suggesting, then that means whenever you get to be my age then you’ll be blazing fiery trails of quietus and rage around me. You’ll be running past my simpleness like a roaring storm and making me look like I’m standing still.

It’s people like you, with your talent and abilities, that make me feel like holding the crowd back and shouting, “watch that one soar! There goes a bright place. Keep your eyes wide and your minds unmired, if magic’s to your taste, because you’ll see some here, bright as the stars arising.”

There’s you, raising standards and sitch… And here’s me, sometimes proud but usually muzzy for my headachy feebleness and hollow trying.

I hate it because you’re, like, raising the stakes. You’re like a dare. You’re like a train made of howls and fire that’s shrieking up the pike after me, and I’m liable to get got, if’n I don’t step it.

LYNETTE:

Damn, that’s good.

Like wicked good.

So good I want to write this amazing reply to your whole post and take the stakes even higher. But it’s one in the morning and I am tired.

Can I get a rain check?

OLIVER:

Rain check given.

LYNETTE: (next morning)

You should know that when I saw your rain check this morning my first thought was GULP, and I thought about leaving that, just that one word reply, gulp, to be funny and also to say in just that one word just how impossible it felt to write anything remotely as brilliant as your response, and thought, maybe that’s stupid and then thought, fuck no, nothing written is stupid, just maybe shades more or less profound, you should see the tornado brewing in my head just from your post.

If you can write something so crazy good, so brilliant, so masterful, off the cuff, just as a REPLY just what are you capable of? I want to buy you a beer or two or three at some little pissy bar and watch your hands, that write so well lift the beers to your face as we solve all the problems of the universe, because we all know those are best solved over copious amounts of beer, and not the best beer either, just the bar specialty that runs through you fast so there’s many trips to the loo, as we laugh and snarl and twirl a finger to signal another round.

You wrote your response to someone young and talked about her youth and her glorious future and I am not so young anymore but I still felt the fire and this morning as I looked in the mirror I wanted a tattoo inside my lower lip, written backwards so I could pull it down as I looked and see it every time I looked, or maybe inked on the meaty part of my left palm, the hand that writes, that says BURN IT.

OLIVER:

Roar!

Burn it, Lynette! We’re all made of cold, dense, waiting. Coal-black not-much that’s weighing us down and wasting our un-grown fire. We’re full of fuel. We’re made of wailing-stuff and wanting-stuff, and our main cleverness is ignoring it and preserving it, cold and dense and waiting.

Burn it, else tomorrow will have no light. Set your waiting screams of slow-dying on fire, give them the life they want, and make. I care not what you make. Just make it.

LYNETTE:

This. THIS. This is what drew me to Medium.

I have nudged an artist friend from time to time to seek fellow artists and be part of an artist community that supports each other…he has a sensitive eye when it comes to his own paintings and tends to see what he wants to repair instead of just how great his paintings are…but he doesn’t reach out and I think it would be wonderful for him if he would.

Reading all the great writers here on Medium, ones like you Mr Shiny, likeTremaine L. Loadholt, Jason Stelzner, Heath Houston, Braden Turner, Wild Flower, Garnet-Shaw, H. Nemesis Nyx, Night Writer, and too many more to list, and those are just the blazing extraordinary talents I have discovered so far in my first two months, has humbled me, excited me, and inspired my writing to a frenzy not felt in the past 20 years.

so thank YOU, and you over there and you and you and you.

Y’all rock.

OLIVER:

Also, I ain’t sure I deserve your kindness. Ain’t completed my novitiate as far as I’m concerned, ye ken? But I thank you for it.

LYNETTE:

We can all use a wee bit of encouragement and praise with our morning tea, whether it be for latching the garden gate securely against the evening gales, or for something more substantial like a beautiful work of art….it’s nourishment.

And you most certainly deserve it.

Looking forward to seeing what you write next.

cheers, L

…………………………………….

Isn’t he WONDERFUL!!!  I am in constant awe of his magnificent talents. Here’s where you can read more of his writing.  And you SHOULD. Oliver Shiny On Medium

HERE’s to a SPLENDID 2017!