Editor’s Note: This story is a few years old but publishing it now because I have promised myself to share more of my writing.

My daughter loves stuffed animals. No. That’s an understatement. She absolutely adores them. All of her stuff animals have a story from her Beanie Baby (™) monkey that was given to her mere hours after she was born to the much larger wearable monkey given to her by her Grandmother. Each one has a story to tell of how they became part of the family.

One evening we went to eat pizza at the local pizzeria with a small arcade. There just so happened to be a claw machine. The claw machine was full of cute stuffed animals just waiting to be adopted by someone who possessed a certain set of skills and plenty of quarters because it is seldom you win on the first try.  Raegan happened to catch a glimpse at a pink teddy bear in the machine and proceeded to talk about it non-stop. This was expected behavior since she loves to discuss stuffed animals. I foolishly thought that once we got to our table and began to eat that she would forget about the bear. No such luck. She proceeded to talk even more about the teddy bear. We figured that if we wanted to eat in peace we would have to do something.

For me, there is no greater joy than to give your child what they want.  Both my husband and I love to play the claw machine, but we play with a strategy.  We only go for winnable prizes. Most prizes are not winnable. For a stuffed animal to be a good candidate, it needs to be at the top of the pile and lying horizontally with nothing pinning it down.  As luck would have it, the teddy bear looked like it could be won, but we only had a $1 which would give us only one chance at snagging the bear.

My husband pulled out his wallet and grabbed the only money he had – a $1 bill. After looking at the excitement on our daughter’s face he handed me the lone $1 to try to win it. I can only reason that he did not want to be the bad guy for not winning the bear and assumed that our daughter would sooner forgive Mommy for not winning the teddy bear than Daddy.  I was nervous about trying since we’d only have one shot and thinking how to explain this to my daughter. I thought disappointment is sadly a lesson we will learn many times. So I fed the machine my $1 and then lined up the claw. Not all claw machines are created equally. The best claw machines will allow you to stop the claw machine as it plunges down. This gives the claw operator a chance to readjust the claw by moving it.  I wasn’t exactly sure if this was one of those machines you could stop the claw in its descent, so I pressed the descent button, hoping to stop it and I could realign. That didn’t work, and the claw continued to travel down into the pool of stuffed animals. I just knew that I wouldn’t win the bear since it appeared the claw was not close enough to the bear.

Somehow the claw wrapped around the bear’s body and hoisted him up. I couldn’t believe that I had picked up the bear on my first try. Picking up the bear is only the first obstacle as the claw arm must successfully carry the prize to the drop zone. I held my breath as the claw traveled to the drop-off point. The claw moved closer violently shaking almost like the bear was a vicious predator that the claw desperately wanted to get rid of. Somehow the bear held on and made the scary five-second ride. The claw opened and down fell the beloved pink teddy bear of my daughter’s dreams.  

My daughter loved that bear and was so happy for the rest of the evening. Then the teddy bear came home and was loved on for a few days with the love and intensity that only a four-year-old can give. Although she may have forgotten about the bear, there is no denying that the bear held a special place in her heart if only for less than a week. It was all made possible because of $1 and some skillful luck.

There is nothing quite like ‘new.’ Writing on that first page of a new notebook is fun. Writing on the second page is ‘eh.’ The same thing can be said for my writing. I love coming up with ideas and even doing some plotting, but I find that after a few days I grow tired of the story. It becomes hard to even reach 300 words on a given writing session compared to the first day of writing that is in the thousands.

Keeping momentum and determination is hard. Why is new so great but the familiar is not? We value old friends and keepsakes. How can we take that kind of value for something ‘old’ and apply it to projects that are no longer ‘new?’

In my heart, I feel like I am a fantasy writer. Or at least I really really want to be one. As I write my fantasy stories they just seem to fall flat. I have to admit that I haven’t read that much in the way of fantasy. I’m not sure why I want to write fantasy other than my husband loves it. Maybe because of my lack of passion for a subject that I just take on his?

I do have a few more story ideas that are not fantasy. One area of writing I would like to explore is humor writing.  I feel bad, though, for constantly coming up with new projects and never finishing any of them. I guess my hope is that one of these new projects will be that magical one that I take to the end.

The new project I feel is a good contender as I have already briefly outlined it from beginning to end – something I have never done before. So I hope as I write it that I can keep it going in the right direction.

My first idea for a fantasy novel was a tongue-in-cheek tale of a torchbearer – the guy in the adventuring party whose job is it to hold the torch while all the other adventurers do cool stuff. While sitting down to map out the story, I changed it. In fact, my idea changed so much that it didn’t even resemble this idea. I wasn’t happy with it at all. My original idea was a guy who was looking to prove himself. What my story turned into was a guy who had it all together and was the one helping others instead of needing the help. It was boring. No wonder I lost interest in telling that story.

I’m really considering starting back with my original idea. I have learned a lot about fiction writing and have a lot to learn, but I will never know if I truly enjoy it unless I do it. I just need to find a way to stay connected with a project until I have completed it.

At Gen Con, we attended as a family a family writing workshop. We really had no idea what to expect but was excited about it. It was the only event all three of us attended together. Both my husband and I love to write. Our daughter  loves to write and draw. We were hoping to gain some tips we could take home and practice.

I hate to say this but the workshop was disappointing. It just felt like they spent absolutely no prep time. We sat in a circle, looked at a picture, and wrote a sentence about it. Then we took our paper, waded it into a ball, and threw it into the middle of everyone. Then everyone grabbed a piece of paper and continued the story. Each round you had a few minutes to write your sentence.

What I didn’t like about this was that the panelists wrote long excerpts on their paper which I found odd. I mean this is not about your writing after all. Also for the younger kids to have to write (and some couldn’t write legibly) that much in a short amount of time was stressful. My child hated the workshop and wanted to leave.

It bothered me that an event that had so much promise from the title really gave us nothing we could take home to use as a writing exercise for the family. Right now my husband is finishing his novel. When he is done, his next project is going to be with our daughter and me. We plan to write a book together which I think will be a much better family writing exercise. I plan to take some notes on what we do and how we tackle it. My plan is to share it here for those people interested in doing a true family writing exercise and want to read how others approached such a project.

So stay tuned and hopefully it will not be another six – eight months before I blog again.