Finished Final Draft of Novel
I'm now ready to type all of those pages into my computer and my software program Scrivener.
Missing Barnum
This time I'm angry.
Forcing the Hand
Before I learned the full extent of what happened to me with my father I drew this. While looking at myself in a reflective surface which distorted my image, I drew and painted Forcing The Hand. I used both hands at the same time.
Forcing The Hand showed many of the emotions my father and I experienced including rage and terror respectively. The amber and blue eyes depicted a wolf’s eyes. My father called himself a wolf. He hunted often and preyed on innocent children.
There's more to this than I wrote last. This work also represents the first time my father used physical abuse to keep me silent about his identity. Forcing The Hand is about my father breaking my forearm. And then he refused to get my arm casted as a punishment and also for me to remember what happened when I disclosed his name to other people. He was super secretive about his identity. I didn't understand why until this year, 2017, when I remembered that he had two professions: he was a serial killer and worked for the law enforcement in the US government.
Writing: My Life Line
Writing has been my life line. Without it I would've perished long ago. To be able to express whatever is on my mind; to be able to write whatever story comes forth from deep within me; to tell a story that must be told. All of these have given me life.
I've written in one form or another since I was nine years old.
Though when my mother died in 2010, my writing took off in a new direction. I couldn't stop telling stories about what I saw happen with my serial killer father. The memories emerged in story after story since 2010. They helped me heal and gave me perspective on what happened to me. In addition I filled pages and pages of journals through writing my story online on a survivor's forum. It's the only place on the web where I spilled out the horrid details of my abuse. I've yet to find another forum like that one. I copied my postings to my journal software on my computer.
In 1976 I first started to journal my life, giving myself permission to write whatever I pleased. It stemmed though from the first time I journaled in one of those keyed, locked diaries one writes in as a child. Back then there were short entries without much depth. My next journal detailed my journey through life yet without the knowledge of what happened to me as a child.
In my head I kept a journal from the time of my first visit to see my father when I was three years old. That journal stayed inside my head for the rest of my life until I learned what the cryptic sounding passages meant. And that's when I unraveled the mysteries of my childhood and the horrid things I witnessed my father doing to others and to me.
Oddest Feeling
It's the oddest feeling being a Christian and writing stories which are contrary to those beliefs. I am drawn to write about my life experiences with my father who was a serial killer. I can't divorce myself from my past.
As the saying goes for writers: Write who you are. Who I am is a product of my upbringing. I spent my formative childhood years in the presence of three mentally disordered people who had personality disorders; my father, my stepdad, and my mother. The worst was being around my psychopathic/narcissistic father and second my narcissistic mother. On the other hand though, the experiences have given me plenty of writing material.