I watched it all float in front of my eyes. Memories not so distant and years ago, reminding me of where I’d been and where I was yet to go. Stuck with you just like a shadow, following you wherever you may roam. I couldn’t get away. I couldn’t run fast enough. Hide away until they floated by. I couldn’t deny them. No matter how far I tried to shove them down in that deep dark corner of my heart, they’re always lurking. Haunting you like your long lost conscience. Whispering. Taunting. Making you out of your mind as you try to lie down to sleep. There was no rest to be found. Closure was something of a dream- an afterthought, something I wanted to obtain but never found a way.

There is no denying it. Memories are your own. You can’t run. You have to face them. Eventually.

There’s nothing like reminiscing about days passed. I mean, memories are what keep you going when you’re stuck in a rut. They make you laugh. They make you cry. They bring back feelings you wish you could forget and the emotions you wished you still had. There is something about memories that if you didn’t have them, you’d be empty inside even when you think you’d be better off.

I’m sure this comes as no surprise to most of you, that I wasn’t always a pirate. Being a pirate is just something that happens. I didn’t fall off the turnip truck as one. I didn’t thumb my way across the world. I didn’t swim across the seven seas and come out of the water all Bond girl-ish with perfect hair and in a white swimsuit with no nipples showing. (Because let’s face it wenches and pirates, you wear white in the water and it turns see-through. And yes I know this to be a fact.) It’s all the experiences along the way that turn you into a pirate. A pirate of your own life.

I use memories in my writing. Sometimes it’s just a glimmer of things that have happened, conversations gone haywire, situations gone bad. Fun times. Crazy times. Use rough outlines of my favorite girlfriends for secondary characters. For me, it makes it fun to write. Besides, who hasn’t thought about the time someone burned you and you couldn’t think of something to say until two days after? It’s all about rewriting it to get your revenge. It’s about reliving a dream you always wanted to share. A life you always wanted but could never have. Taking the chances through a character and forgoing the consequences. Seeing how much they can take before they break. Or you. Depends on the memory.

Memory writing can be tough. It can also be like therapy. We’ve talked about that on the ship before so I’m not going into it again. A good example of writing from memories can be writing high school scenes with your characters. Everyone has a high school memory they’d like to tweak. Rewrite. Fix for the better. But for me, it’s like writing sex. Sex is hard to write. Hands down. I can write torture. I can write blood dripping from the edge of a bathtub. I can write evil bad guys- murder in their eyes, cruel smiles twisted on their lips, without a problem. But writing a sex scene is sheer agony. I spend most of my time while writing a sex scene running through my head (this goes here, that goes there, insert here, do this, touch that) it’s completely nerve wracking. I suppose for me, it’s like that first time together. It’s supposed to be this beautiful moment, and really it ends up being this massive clus– *ahem* mess where you bump heads right as your about to have that sweet moment. It ruins it.

I have no problem with people reading what I write. No. I couldn’t care less if someone reads a sex scene I wrote where it’s reverse cowgirl and she’s waving the cowboy hat in the air like she’s in the rodeo. It’s the intimacy of the scene between me and my reader. It’s like being a voyeur in my own world. Mostly because you write what you know. So when I write sex, it feels like I’m spilling the dirty details of my bedroom romps. I’m not… really. To me, writing certain things reminds me of memories whether they are or not. And sex happens to be one of those memory things that no matter how hard you try to stray from experience, you end up writing exactly how it goes in your mind. Except you make it a little more… perfect.

So I can’t be the only one. Spill it pirates and wenches. Have you ever had a memory that you put into book form? For readers, have you ever read a book that mirrored something that happened in your life or something like it? Care to share?