Oh, The Stories You’ll Write

Based on Oh, the Places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss

Congratulations! A writer you’ve become. You’ve got journals and pencils! All under your thumb!

With your muse by your side and your butt in the chair, creativity abounds with nary a care.

You’ve now quit both your day jobs. Full time you will write. Your ideas overflow, and your journey’s in sight.

You’ll write about this, about that and the other. About some you will say, “I won’t choose yet another.”

“You must stick to a niche!” From the sidelines they yell. Yet you choose to write all, and you write it all well.

Or at least so you think, until stats come around. They make barely a hiccup. Your heart’s on the ground.

A day or so after your energy lifts. “I can’t really think this soon that my stats will shift.”

“I am not so naive as to think that they would. And despite what they show, my work’s really quite good.”

So you stick to the course, reject niche shouters all. Though they scream and they yell, your eye stays on the ball.

You work day and all night. You try topics galore. You write in different styles, expect numbers to soar.

Yet your stats remain low for this month once again. And the numbers are barely above where they’d been.

You question your choice to leave steady pay behind. In pursuit of a dream you can’t now seem to find.

You try different tags and new topics and voices. Perhaps self promotion will reward your choices.

But of all of the things that you try none bear fruit. Despondent, lost hope makes your dreams now seem moot.

Just then does your muse sally forth with a vengeance “Up by your bootstraps you’ll pull, start your engines!”

A more difficult task mistress never was seen. You cry out, then stutter, “M-m-muses shouldn’t be mean!”

“Buck up and get over it,” she yells with a slap. “Now to hit you cannot, your contract let’s recap.”

“You can stand on your laurels, let chances go by. But learn this you will, your wants won’t make you fly.

It takes hard work and more, plus some more even then. And still it takes time before you’ll see a win.

When fortune does knock, answer quick and accept. If you don’t then the niche folks will take the next step.

Run after experience that will teach you to soar, from mentor and newbie and elder and more.

Only then one day will you realize what you’ve sown has slowly and carefully become tall and grown.

It will satiate you even as new words fly, before you to trigger new hunger inside.

For true writer’s grit is forged all in the heart. It takes strength, and much courage to bear from the start.”

So you do as she says, opportunities you chase and accept, and you write at a new frenzied pace.

You ignore all the numbers, and keep your mood steady. When new chances knock you are always all ready.

It takes a full year before your labor blooms Into flowers, first small but growing to loom.

Above you, before you but still you don’t rest. For success from your grasp your Muse she will wrest.

Though work is a must and will never abate, you know that to write is your life’s blood, true fate.

Natalie Frank (Taye Carrol) has had work featured in Haunted Waters Press, Weirdbook Magazine, Siren’s Call Publications, Lycan Valley Press and Zero Fiction among others. Her poetry has been featured in several anthologies. She is Editor for 1-One-Infinity and One Table, One World and Editor in Chief for Promposity and Mental Gecko. She is also the Managing Editor for Novellas and Serials at LVP Publications.

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