Day 8 -- Finding the Sun

"She set him down on a park bench.  'I'll be back in 20 minutes, dad.  Stay put.'  He laughed.  'I'm not going anywhere,' he replied and adjusted the thick glasses that shielded his unseeing eyes."

Oddly enough being legally blind isn't the same thing as being blind.  I fall into the first category, but I can still see well enough to do things here and there.  That said, you'll always see shows on TV that want to make super-humans out of blind people--as though their other four senses were somehow ten times better than everyone else's.  But the truth is, blind peoples' senses are the same as ours, they've just been training how to use them differently than we do for ...generally longer than we have, unless they've only just gone blind.  In which case, they're in the same boat as you and me.

That said, learning how to "see" without being able to see is definitely possible.  Maybe you can't see the colors of something, but your idea of color might be attuned to sensations instead--especially if you have someone in your life that can tell you what color the things around you are.

I want to say one last thing about the Netflix show Daredevil.  What the protagonist does on that show is beyond what a normal blind person (or any person) can do.  That's why he's part of the Marvel comic book universe.  He's a superhero who just happens to have been blinded by chemicals when he was young.  And I like to think something in those chemicals changed him, but I guess I'll just have to wait and see as I've never read the comic.

For now, though...let's try and explore the world together from a park bench.

Day 7 -- Where I'd Rather Be

"He lay in the tall summer grass, gazing up at the sky.  He saw worlds there, in the sky.  Worlds of dragon fire, castles, and knights in shining armor...."

So as you may have noticed, I haven't written anything in the past few days.  That's because John and I were down visiting some of our friends who are about to move rather far away.  They wrote a book, by the by, and if you haven't had a chance to read it, I highly suggest checking it out.  You can find it here.

That said, today's challenge has actually given me a bit of trouble.  I've been thinking about it off and on for the past several days, and it hasn't gotten any easier thinking about it.  Part of the reason for that is that children's voices, when written by adults, tend to be a great deal more intelligent or insightful than they should be.  I have a harder time considering children's ideas and motives because, while I was once a child myself, there are a lot of things I have forgotten since then; also, I don't have any children in my life right now.  So, writing a child's voice is...more difficult than it may at first appear.

That is one of the few criticisms that John and I tend to consider when we're looking at children in other peoples' novels, namely because it's terribly obvious when children aren't quite as they should be.  Of course, writing about all of this makes me think I need a good dose of Roald Dahl, or perhaps some Dr. Seuss.

Today's prompt, however, leads me to believe that this young boy isn't five, six, or even seven, but somewhere in that awkward preteen stage--somewhere between 9 and 12 by my estimation.  It's that time in life that I sort of recall being more or less awkward.  You don't really know who you are; you're trying new things--a lot of which don't work.  There's a lot of jealousy, a lot of unkindness from other kids, and a lot of unconscious fear (which accounts for some of that meanness).  But there's also this self-centeredness that some people never really outgrow.  When you become a teen, there is a greater realization of the world around you--which causes its own host of problems; but 9-12 is that magical time when you can kind of--if you were like me--shut out the rest of the world and make it all about you.

I think, honestly, this is where a lot of writers get into trouble.  While children do have a sense of consequence for their actions, they don't really have a self-awareness that's related to the rest of the world around them.  They've only just started defining themselves by the other people and things around them, and that process becomes a nightmare right about the same time that hormones kick in--which is where I see our young dreamer from today's prompt.  Luckily, he's a boy; so, his hormonal changes aren't as drastic as it would be for a girl.  Still, this is definitely that point in life where girls are talking about bras (and making fun of other girls for not having them; oh, Ramona Quimby!--how you helped me survive my preteen years with your wisdom--though I did sort of read you before you were actually relevant to me;) boys and girls start relating to one another romantically (again, something I started really early;) and a child's sense of self begins to be explored in the sense of other kids' senses of themselves (sexuality, intellectual prowess (or lack thereof,) coordination (and lack thereof,) etc.)

So, ...now that I've gotten a basis for where to begin, do I write about a boy who is just realizing that he's gay?  Do I write a poem torn from a notebook page of youth?  Or do I poke at the bear of normalcy and see if it comes up dancing?  I'll admit, I'm excited about all three possibilities, but the first two are things I haven't seen much of at all in books--the first, obviously, because I grew up in a mostly heterosexual world.  It's only recently that fear and bigotry have started to give way to something resembling acceptance around the world, sadly.  BUT,...I don't think I can aptly portray that kind of childhood.  I have a lot of ideas and theories, but not having lived through that, or gone through that, I don't think I would do the mental psychology of that child justice.  I do hope, however, that gay, lesbian, transgender, (and all the other alternative ways of loving someone or being a human being) kids have their own Ramona Quimby one day--because, honestly, it's bad enough being different as a kid without having an imagined (if not real) hero to relate to.

So that leaves me with a poem--an interesting thought exercise, one I'm not sure I'm up to the task of doing well.  But let's see if we can find the poetic voice of our childhood boy....