Writing is my Tree House

You know when you were a kid and you had 'that place' you went whenever you wanted and as long as you were there, nobody could get to you and nothing else mattered?  It might have been a tree house, or a big rock in the middle of the woods, or even just a fort made of bed sheets and and lawn chairs.  Writing is my tree house now.  It's my safe place, where no one else can go, no matter how they try.  That's what writing is to me, a land in and of itself.  Sometimes it's dangerous, sometimes frustrating and at other times it's a place where anything can happen.  

I have a friend who is always telling me that I love writing because it creates a chemical high, just as potent as taking a drug.  I HATE that he insists this is the true basis for why I'm so obsessed with writing.  And I flat don't agree with it.  I love tattoos as well, but not because I enjoy being poked thousands of times by seven needles at once.  The needles and pain are a part of tattooing, but they aren't why I love tattoos.  I love writing. Period.  I don't need a reason to love it, I don't have to justify the love of it, or try and dissect what causes me to love writing.  I just love it.   

If anyone happens to read this, let me know what writing is to you...

And Again....

So another round of query letters out, and another round of rejections back in. Now I'm getting a new round of query letters together. It rather feels like being on a merry-go-round in a windstorm, with every sailing piece of debris representing another rejection. But hey, I like the wind, and one day, when I'm staring at a hard copy of published work, my eyes will trail over the bookshelves to the massive framed collage of all those rejection letters, or so I keep telling myself. One of the bloggers I've been following (and you'll have to forgive the lack of a link here, I haven't gotten that under my belt yet) by the name of Cat Rambo, recently put up a post referring to the amount of persistence required by someone who wants to get published. In her post, she put a link to yet another blogger who'd posted about persistence. Both blogs are very good and did much to diminish my frustrations over the latest rejection letters.
I've submitted a short story to a local contest, and I'm working on more stories to submit either to contests, or magazines. My position in life is similar one of the astronauts in this quirky play we put on in highschool called "Kaliedoscope". During the play, the astronauts are thrown into space in different directions by an explosion, and though they know they aren't alone, none of them are ever able to find each other again. I'm not so hopeless as that, but for the time being, I'm simply floating through space in search of an asteroid called Agent. Persistence and tenacity are two traits I've never been short on, however, so until something changes, it's out with the queries, in with the rejections and begin the dance again. My collage is going to be magnificent. :)