Good morning! Yesterday, I didn't do much of anything, but I recieved something that made my heart thud. It was from such an unexpected direction that I still can only be grateful.

My daughter read part of my wip. She hated it, but still, she says I taught her what she knows. She's angry because I seem to have tossed everything I know about writing out the window. She's right. I did. I focussed on the story, kept my overly critical brain out of the loop, and kept moving forward. That did manage to get words on the page, but now I'm having a devil of a time with the re-write.

The most fantastical part of this is the amount of enthusiasm my daughter brings to her thoughts. She likes the story, just not the way I'm working it. So, she wants to help on a more permanent basis. I do, though, have to keep in mind that she's a busy kid, with a kid of her own and one on the way. She's paused now, won't begin school again until fall, so I have a couple of months to figure out how to entertain her with the writing.

I know having family members critique is usually not something one really wants to rely on. They tend to tell you nice things, candy coat it and never mention that the idiotic thing bored them to tears. However, my daughter will tell me what's wrong. She's proven that already, so I'm going to just be happy.

For four years, I think (not sure, my time sense is pretty screwed up) I had no internet, no writing group, nothing but the whirls of thought in my head. For a while, I gave up writing altogether. I had an invalid husband to care for, and two kids, and a granddaughter on the way for half that time, and before that, I was lost in a fog. Not sure what I needed at that point, but I was extreemly depressed, frightened of life, and I think huddling in my home and not dealing with anything helped.

But that's not who or what I am. I've come out of the shell again. Writing began a few months ago, and I've been fairly steady since then.

And my daughter made me cry last night. Not a bad cry, especially since I tend to weep at the drop of a hat, but a good one, a relieved one. Someone noticed how I struggled, the problems I had, and responded rather than walking away. It does make one feel appreciated, loved, and otherwise cared about.

She said she knew how much writing meant to me, and she'd been worried about me since I stopped. Now that I've resumed, she's worried I'll stop again. She wants to help, and wants to read my work for personal reasons as well.

Then, on top of all of it, my mother said she wanted to read the thing. Coulda knocked me over with a feather. Ma doesn't really like fantasy, or anything that treats good and evil with too broad of a stroke. She's never been unkind about my writing, but she's never gone out of her way to say she wants to read it. Okay, so now I have to do more than write ahead. I have to make it worth reading.

The entirety of life is merely a search for approval, I think. First, we want to please Mom and Dad, who are the only humans we really know at that age. Then, we want to please teachers and friends, and then only friends as we hit teen age. Friends stay the focus, I think, until later. And mixed in there, some of us want approval from God, from other authority figures, etc. Then, at the end of life, we still haven't gotten everything we want, the approval was either for things that don't matter to us, or it was muted or non-existent. And, no matter how loving our parents, our friends, our co-workers, or even our God, it is never enough.

Life isn't futile, I tell myself. It's always a work in progress, and we still might figure out how to force ourselves to approve of our own lives, which is really the answer to all of it.

Okay, lesson done for the day. I think I'll go write something.

Just keep writing.