The Return

After a five and a half year hiatus, I am resuming my blogging activities. Or will be attempting to at least.

A lot has changed. And a lot is the same.

Mr. Amazing Dude and I have a two children and one we look forward to meeting in heaven one day.

My husband still works in marketing, while I'm a mom-of-all-trades, part-time paid researcher, part-time seminarian, writer-in-the-margins, and all-the-time dreamer. We traded our tiny in-town condo for a slightly less tiny rural-ish townhouse.

Oh, and Adora Kitty still lives with us albeit crankier now that There. Are. Kids.

So why am I reviving this blog? A couple of reasons.

First, I really do want to publish. And nowadays even fiction writers need a platform. It's why I started this blog in the first place. And it's proven to be a bit of a chore to manage, as proven by my neglect of it. Life required my attention and I didn't have the emotional wherewithal to work on my novels, much less a blog, during the last five years. Things like a newborn, a couple of years of post-partum anxiety/depression, starting seminary, a miscarriage, and then the birth of our second (third?) child. I know some people find it needful to write through these times. It spurs healing. I'm generally not one of these people. I need to survive an event, find some space to breath, reflect, and then process my thoughts through writing.

I find it ironic that I'm picking this blog back up during the peak (I hope) of the coronavirus pandemic.

Second, I had a fantastic professor last semester, Dr. Sandra Glahn, who told me in her kindly honest (honestly kind?) way that I needed to be publishing. Not just writing. I can't think of a bigger compliment to receive. I was floored, exhilarated and humbled all at once. So after Sunshine Bear was born at the end of 2019, I took her challenge to heart and have submitted non-fiction pieces for publishing (which I'll link to here as they are published).

But my heart is still in fictional story-telling. Or fictional realism as I like to call it. I get inspired by real-life stories and then make them my own. My stories aren't original (is there anything new under the sun?) but they are more fictive than "based on a true story." And I'm happy to report that one such of these novels, After Her Death, is in it's third full draft in an editor's queue. One of my goals this year is to have it in a ready enough condition to secure an agent. I'm so excited that I'm this much closer to seeing this story published--a story that I've scribbled on and breathed in my quiet moments for so many years.

So here I am again. Blogging. I may be more sporadic than before, but I will try to not let five years go by again. 

Photo by Daniel Tuttle on Unsplash