I'm back!

How does one catch up with a blog after being absent for about ten years? What kept me from writing? Practically everything! But it makes no sense. I love writing, whether it’s silly children’s books—which I first wrote nearly 40 years ago as a homework assignment in a writing class—or  serious political commentaries—which I refuse to do anymore. (Politics cause me way too much angst.)

At any rate, here I am back at the keyboard. What happened ten years ago to make my writing dry up (albeit temporarily)? To make a really, really long story short:

·       Serial rejection blew out my pilot light. (But everyone knows you just have to persist!)

·       I got a part-time job as a university adjunct instructor. (If anything dries up the urge to write, it’s a job, gosh darn it.) It lasted for nine years.

·       Skip to the birth of my first grandchild who was located long-distance. (Because of that sweet thing, I was traveling out of town every 4-6 weeks.)

·       My first grandchild gave up her only-child status.

·       Covid hit, and shortly after, my husband retired. (At this point, we moved to help take care of the little ones.)

I could write pages about things that happened during my absence, but I won’t. It’s like trying to catch up with a journal that you’ve neglected for years on end. Impossible! And some things just have to be left out for the sake of – well, boring you.

When I was a senior in high school, I remember three friends and I cruising through town, a common thing to do when time was all we had. But what was unusual about this car ride was that we made up rhymes for the couple of hours we were together. Seriously. Who does that?! But that was fun for me then and continues to be fun for me now—not the cruising part, but the imaginative spark that wants to be turned into a blaze.

So what is prompting me to take up the pen again, so to speak? It’s a realization that life is too short not to do what I’m good at and not to do what I love.