My life, to say the least, is complicated. It never fits into neat, orderly compartments. It rarely pans out the way I envision it will (and, mostly, thats a very good thing!) and lists are often lost and forgotten halfway through completion. I've never been the most task-oriented or organized individual, but chaos became a mandatory and expected way of life when I had kids.
Those boys are my life and that's the way its supposed to be...the way I choose it to be. P and I love playing "Go Fish!" fifteen times before D goes to bed. I even love letting D win, despite seeing his cards from a mile away. I like all my clothes smelling like Gentlease formula. (Crap. That's a lie. I don't like that part. But I love that lil' man like he's always been here. Like life didn't exist with all these colors and all this madness before he entered the scene two short months ago.) I like how busy P and I keep ourselves...the constant "go! go! go!" pace we keeps ensures that we don't fall over dead from exhaustion if we ever were to stop and think about how little sleep and sanity we really muster up.
That said, there are parts of my life, despite being a parent, that I miss. A lot. That I feel really do belong to me, no matter how insane our lives become.
A long time ago, I had a plan to be a writer. A real writer. A writer who actually wrote. A writer who actually wrote and, at least most of the time, enjoyed the process. I was that person for a nanosecond when I first started graduate school. Then classes became another demand I had to fit in along with D and a full-time job.
And then when I graduated, writing and all of my work that I had either started or finished was more like a monument than living things that I'd continue to nurture. I had a baby to nurture, and nurturing does not come naturally to someone like me. It took all I had, and that's putting it mildly. (Not that D got all that much from me...I'm sure when the therpist bills start coming in somewhere in his mid-life, we'll all know just how crappy of a nurturer I really am!)
But, for once in a long, long while, I'm mildly excited about talking about writing. Maybe (gasp!) even about WRITING itself. (And yes, I do realize it's a bit lame to be writing about writing, but whatever floats my boat or finds my lost remote, right?)
The local Romance Writers chapter is hosting a writing contest. At one point in the middle distant past, I was an AVID reader of romance novels. (At this point, I'm lucky to read a J Crew catalog those rare times I get 3 minutes alone in the bathroom...but then, oh then, I was consuming them at an alarming rate as if they were made with sugar and butter and caramel.)
It's a ten-page contest. What's not to love? I have a project in a binder somewhere on my shelf that I started three or four years ago that could qualify with a little tweaking. The caveat? All entries due NLT April 1. And that gives me about four days to polish it or create it anew. What's not to love?
The second? Oh, the second. I'm a closet zombie fanatic. I've imagined a life where I make my millions and secure my family's comfort for years to come off the profits I make from selling thousands and thousands of copies of books packed with scourges and hordes of terror-inflicting zombies.
I found a horror magazine seeking short stories for their May edition. Why not says I? Give myself til April 8 to get it in? Maybe get a jump start on that zombie glory and fortune I'll create for us someday?
I know, I know. I've set some might lofty goals here. More likely than not, I'll be puked on and overtired to the point that polishing up that ol' romance manuscript is about as appealing as organizing the junk drawer. But maybe, just maybe...
'til then...
No comments:
Post a Comment