When your voice won't work use your pen

Have you had that ah-ha moment, oh you know the one, ten minutes after a fight or someone made you mad you know what you should have said?  That stirring in you gut sticks with you for hours, days, months.  The gnawing feeling you have when you see that person, hear about them, or darn it--that fight or argument replays in your head again, still eats away at you.

Be honest, it happens to all of us.  For me, I'm nearly a 2nd degree black belt (October 2012 by the way-happy dance continues) and if you attack me physically I could defend myself.  If a job needs to get done, I have the discipline to do it.  However, for being a best selling author, words never surface when they need to.

I can give you one heck of dirty look.  I still have the teenage girl in me that can talk just a bit too loud so you can get the gist of my point, but to say what needs to be said at the moment it needs to be said is not a talent I have.  So how do I combat these feelings of loss to my pride when words deceive me and leave me unsatisfied?

I write them in my stories!

To date I haven't murdered anyone in my books.  Well no one within the book.  I have put a few of my husband's quirky habits into my heroes and yes, my mother caught this one, my father's favorite pizza.  But I haven't made any nemesis die, though I could.  However, the words that must be spoken are said.  And they fly freely from my fingertips through the virtual mouth of my heroine.  She gets the satisfaction of telling someone exactly what I would have told someone else had my throat not closed off when I needed to speak.

The best part about all this is I can work out my frustrations and I get paid to do so.  And chances those people aren't going to read me anyway, but they don't even know they did wrong by me.  I usually laugh when I make a snide comment on Facebook and the person in which it is about likes my status.  It's worth the laugh.

However, on a serious note, this writing challenge started for me at a young age.  It was my mother's coping mechanism.  She didn't get mad very often.  She didn't scream or yell a lot.  She sat down with a piece of paper and wrote a letter that would tear you to pieces.  Then she would rip up the paper and throw it away.  I often wondered why she did that.  But as I grew older I understood.  Some of us can't say the words that need to be said, but we can write them.  And sometimes no one has to read them to make us feel better.  We just feel better having seen the words for ourselves.

Happy Reading!
Bernadette Marie