Then I began an online writing course despite all my usual suspicions. After all, how can someone else teach you how to write the stories that matter to you? And how, I wondered, should someone who did not know me be able to teach me something I had not already learnt in almost fifteen years of trial and error?

I’m glad that I overcame my arrogance and invested the money (admittedly, not very little for someone with my salary). In retrospect, I would have paid the price for the whole course just to receive the first three lessons, because they taught me how to find new ideas when I thought I had none. Right now, I feel as though I will never run out of stories that will be close to my heart and full of all my passions and longings. If you write and you think you may have lost your direction, I recommend this course with all my heart – and no, I’m not getting paid to say this. It’s an honest recommendation. Here’s the link: Holly Lisle’s How to Think Sideways.

But back to today. I started this novel in June 2011 and took it through Holly’s course, and despite her great guidance, it’s been a stubborn story. That wasn’t her fault – though I think perhaps the techniques she teaches in turn made my muse want to tell a story that was not just alright, but that mattered to me. As it turns out, this story mattered enough to make me cry while I wrote it, and that has only ever happened to me with Thalanien. So in every way, Holly kept her promise. She didn’t forget to mention that such fulfilment comes with a cost, but I forgot to remember it.

I wrote the sad bit of the ending yesterday, but I wasn’t sure I would be able to finish it today. My muse knew, though. I cleaned the flat today, washed the dishes, did the laundry, and all the while, my heart was racing. It was a reaction as if to a physical danger. Apart from being in actual danger, I’ve had this reaction in only one situation before, and it wasn’t writing-related. I’ve never to this point been physically afraid of writing.

In the end, I gave in. I sat down in my little writing corner with a cup of tea and listened to Loreena McKennitt’s Raglan Road on repeat and high volume. Every story I write has a song that goes with it and inspires me. This is the one for The Sacrifice. It took me a good hour to write 1200 words, which isn’t the greatest of achievements. But every one of those words mattered. I poured my heart out onto those pages and it bled and hurt like hell. It’s no wonder I was afraid. My muse knew what we were getting ourselves into.

For a few hours afterwards, I was numb, stunned, unable to feel. It was as though by putting and end to that story, I had also put an end to myself. Perhaps that is, in a way, what happens when you write: you put a part of yourself into the story and once that’s done, it’s gone forever. It belongs now to the ones who will read it, or to the characters who lived and suffered through it.

I’ve no doubt that I will be writing more stories, and I hope that all or at least some of them will matter as much as this one. But for today, and perhaps tomorrow, I’ll just be grieving.

Back to the book. It is quite a comical story about a family whose members have fallen apart years ago and whose lives have crashed into chaos. HIV, robbery, selling an unborn child, a letter from Prince William to Lady Di, a mad chase for a woman named Shw (yes, really) and chaotic love triangles are only some of the complications this family faces. Through it all runs a thread of love that, while thin and worn, still keeps them together somehow.

I must admit that it was hard for this book to intrigue me. I’m reading it on recommendation from a colleague and I’m not usually into comedy. However, Douglas Coupland succeeds in weaving the comical aspects into other threads that are emotional and even philosophical, and all of this without slipping into preaching. This book is one of the few that has made me laugh out loud while reading it. It’s made me teary-eyed, too.

And it makes me think. I love it when books make me think–in fact, I consider a book which doesn’t make me think a waste of time. The underlying theme, to me, seems to be something as cliché as ‘love conquers all’, while steering clear of actually being cliché. While I have never been much of a family person, this book makes me think of my own family, the things that went wrong, the things that went right, and that the former is worth fixing because of the latter. I love my family, and this book reminds me not to give it up easily.

I set new priorites yesterday to give my writing the time it deserves to have in my daily life. Douglas Coupland makes me want to set new priorities today in order to give my family, too, the time it deserves.

In my mind, books are so much more than words on paper. The best of books can impact your life to the point where they save it. Less dramatically, they can steer it into a new direction, make you happy or sad, open your mind further, and make you think. Make you set new priorities.

All Families are Psychotic did that, and it is a book that was well worth the time I spent reading it. Apart from that, though, it is also entertaining to read, and I recommend it.