Between

Beginnings carry with them for writer and person a sense of energetic inspiration, the start of some new cycle or work, propelled by the thought that this project might be the most defining of a lifetime. 

Endings carry the sense of a cycle of accomplishment or the end of a dreary cycle, sometimes regarded as a slump. Between is a state many persons and writers tend to overlook, favoring instead the There of an accomplishment.

Of the three states, Between seems the most profitable for the person of you and for the writer you have been and are on the way of becoming. Exciting and energizing as beginnings are, Between is the place where you learn the most about yourself as a person and the characters and/or ideas you try to explore as a writer.

You've been between a rock and a hard place, between Scylla and Charybdis, and on a scale of one to ten, at about a five in relationship to the devil and the deep blue sea. You've also been between jobs, between projects, and between options, all of which have been murky businesses of one sort or another, where you felt yourself to be marking time until you were no longer in that between limbo no-person's land separating the various aspects of the self, rather you were once again focused, asea on a raft hastily constructed of the flotsam and jetsam of the you who was between.

Even afloat on this jerry-built raft, you were no longer between; you were at sea, possibly headed to the folly of disaster but also in sight of the shoreline of success. You've been on collision courses, as though in the sort of dream where you see disaster looming ahead, but find yourself unable to veer off to a safer course or avoid the impact. Only last night, you were in such a dream, where you were driving a VW Beetle that had begun to spin out of control on a snowy road.

Even as you dreamed, you were aware of the potential way out of waking yourself from the dream, but there you were, between waking and sleeping, aware of a way out but curious to see how far into disaster the driving forces of the dream would take you.

Between is fraught with the magnetic pull of disastrous results and last-minute rescue solutions. Here, your tenacity of confidence is every bit as great a force as some unspeakable disaster, one that invariably sends you lurching into wakefulness. 

You're still groggy, trying to fit dream state clues with actual moments in real time, but now, your concerns will have in secret turned on a dire seminar, leaving you asking How and What as you try to make the stages of mind form some congruence.The sad truth is that you can't find the congruence, you can only find the dark humor of your attempt.

Your dealings with characters and with ideas in nonfiction seem better served by between than your dealings as a person trying to accommodate his way along the available paths of life. You find story and satisfaction in the between state which, if exacerbated enough, seems to suggest some solution to the characters or to you, with the job that you must now convince the characters.

The you in real life is less patient than the individual manipulating characters. On frequent occasions, you'll jump to impatient conclusions or attempt to show how the wrong persons cause the most trouble.There you are again, somewhere in between.