It's been a busy few weeks for me. With all the fall sports activities in full swing, my calendar fills up rather quickly. There are days I've been at three or four events. I haven't even been able to watch an entire football game. I think I've been at two every Friday night since the season started.
Not only that, but I've been trying to finish the Christmas program for my church. As we were working on last year's program, I had what I thought was a good idea for a play. Most plays/programs focus on the nativity, or birth of Christ, as you would expect. Jesus's birth is the reason we celebrate Christmas, after all. Church programs are full of Mary, Joseph and Jesus, the shepherds and the angels. But there are other people in the narrative who seem to be overlooked. The wise men who come to visit Jesus might be mentioned in passing, but that's it. And how about Herod? He's the reason the family went to Egypt, which is also glossed over.
Hence, my idea. My play starts with the nativity, then skips to the wise men. One of the Sunday school classes will read it through for me this week. I'm excited but also nervous. People read my stuff all the time. I do work for a newspaper, after all. But this is something different. This isn't me sharing someone else's story or the actions at a meeting. This came completely out of my imagination. I'm sure it will be fine, but there's still trepidation.
And then, because apparently I'm a glutton for punishment, I agreed to put together the historical society's newsletter. We're scheduling it every couple months for the moment, but I'm sure it will go back to monthly once we get everything figured out. It was one of those things where, every time I looked at it, I wanted to make it better. Now I have the chance. It joins the church newsletter that I've been doing for the last couple years.
On the back burner, such as it is, are more ideas - for Christmas plays, for books, for the newsletters. There are so many things I want to do, words I want to write, that I doubt I'll get them all out of my head before I die.
I got to hear Ted Kooser speak last weekend. Mr. Kooser is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and former U.S. Poet Laureate who lives out by Garland. Every time I've heard him speak, he challenges me to be better at what I do. He writes every day, a journal entry and pieces of poems and essays. I leave his talks determined to write daily, because I know that will make me a better writer, and promptly fail my goal. I write a lot on Mondays and Tuesdays for work, but the rest of the week I don't put many words together on paper or computer. So there's another goal.
