2020 is starting off WRITE! Pardon the corny pun, I really couldn’t help myself. Besides, as corny as it is, that’s how it feels for me. I was writing as the year clicked over because I WANTED to start this year ‘Write’. I wanted to begin this year putting my writing first. I’ve spent so many years putting everything else first, work, relationships, STRESS. For so long I’ve kept this part of me in a small Tupperware in the back of my ‘Life Fridge’, pulling it out when I had a free moment. Most of my writing has been done on lunch breaks, or worse in those few short minutes before bed when the world and my own self are quiet enough to think. For so many years I was conditioned to treat it like a hobby, and nothing is inherently wrong with that, EXCEPT, for me writing is EVERYTHING. When I can’t write I feel like I’m suffocating yet most of my life I’ve written in guilty snatches of time. It wasn’t always that way, at the beginning of my writing journey, the 15 year old me who’d scratched out her first novel in a bright yellow binder was SO certain writing was going to be her world. It consumed every free moment and I KNEW I was going to be a writing and live this awesome life creating and bringing my imagination into reality. Then life happened. Or rather my mother and I got my first real hard look at how mental illness can destroy every life it touches. She burned everything, my first two books, all my poetry, every idea I had ever come up with. She BURNED everything. I don’t say this figuratively, I mean LITERALLY. And worst of all, she made ME do it. I had to be the one to put everything, that first precious novel into the fire and set a match to it. It HURT so bad. A part of me died a little. Sounds very melodramatic to say, but it was a first death, the death of my innocence and childhood and within months of that I lost my parents. I was seventeen. For a long time after that my writing was pushed back into a corner, oh I still wrote, like I said, I can’t breathe unless I’m writing, but it lost its place in my life as I tried to rebuild. Over the next few years it came back and I wrote another novel, the first since the BURNING TIMES (as I will forever refer to that literary conflagration). I wrote it in eleven months only on lunch breaks and little stolen moments because my husband (Yes I married VERY young, only a few months after turning 18) felt it was a waste of time and I should be focused on him and the ‘Real’ world. But, I wrote it and I published it my first time out. And that small success became a painful wedge between us. Instead of pushing me to pursue a career and market and make something of this amazing achievement, he became angry and resentful. I wonder how much worse it would have been had I made a lot of money with that first one?
Life continued to intrude after that, coming in the guise of a divorce by twenty two and a full on battle with Bi-Polar that I’ve finally settled in a comfortable treaty. It won’t win, but it won’t go away either. More LIFE, more things pushing to the front and I kept pushing my writing back. I still wrote, I still created worlds but I lost hope that it would be my future and my calling. So MANY things happened and in the center of the WORST of it, I rediscovered my writing. And now, I’m forty (Loving it by the way!) and I’m taking control. I’m finally putting my writing first, because I’m old enough to know I can. I’m the one in control of my life, the good, the bad and if I want something I need to be the one to make it happen.
So, with that said I’m starting 2020 WRITE and it’s been going GREAT! So much so that I finished the book I was working on, Angel Child, which is the 3rd book of the ShadowGate Series. I wrapped that baby up on January 11, 2020 and now I’m working to find my next book love affair. Usually takes me about 3 months to find ‘The One’ so we’ll see. Possibly book 4 of the series, Sanctuary, or a story I started in 2016 that I never finished (I’ve got lots of started stories waiting to be finished). Whichever book is waiting for me, it’s going to be great, because this year it’s ALL about writing!
Until next time,
L
The ShadowGate: Enter and be saved…
