I never win anything.
Paradoxically, I had decided not to attend the conference. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested; I just had loads on my plate. I’m preparing for what well may be my final visit to New England, particularly Emily Dickinson’s Homestead, a continuation of my Dickinson studies and Amazon Alexa Skills. As if that weren’t enough, I’m going to Salem, seat of the witch trials, to reconnect and regain my feel for a story begun on an earlier visit. I am driving rather than flying, so I’m also revisiting the scene of another story, Gettysburg. Might as well take another peek at Appomatox since it is on the way, and, while I’m there, Monticello. Then on the backside there is Saratoga, which I intend to launch my local American Revolution studies (I live essentially in Cowpens), and I’m not going to pass up an opportunity to attend the Baseball Hall of Fame. So, as you can see, I’ve got a lot to prepare for.
So that, more than the three hundred bucks, separated me from Celebrate Tolken. Impulsively, however, I stuck out my thumb and retweeted an offer from @MyTravelersRest, where I viewed the recent solar eclipse.
I won.
No way I’m passing that ride up.
And so I began re-reading The Hobbit in preparation for the conference. The Hobbit, I suppose, was where I truly fell in love with literature. It was the summer after my freshman year in college, and I had just gotten married. I remember distinctly the cover and the bad wallpaper in the apartment. I had read stuff before, of course, many things, and more worthy things. Middle Earth transported me to places I wanted to be.
And now I understand that, “just coincidentally”, it is transporting me to places I need to be now, as a writer. For many years I have worked on my language skills, gravitating, like I would think most writers do, towards poetry. But revisiting The Hobbit, and watching Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, I see what a master storyteller Tolkien was. I have known for some time that it is my storytelling skills that needs crafting.
Fortuitous I won the lottery.
wordsmyths 