Where Have I Been?

 If you’re reading this, we’re probably already friends. Either we know each other in real life, or we know each other because you have read my other posts that I’m sure I’ll be posting in the future.

Hello there, my friend. I’m glad you’ve stopped by.

It’s been several years since I’ve done anything related to writing. It’s been several years since I’ve wanted to do anything related to writing. 

So what have I been doing all this time?

The answer is, living a grown up life. (That sounds way more boring than it did in my head). As you may have guessed if you’ve read any of my stories or novels, I wrote them all when I was a teenager in high school. I was thirteen and fourteen when I wrote and published The Quill Chronicles. The following year I wrote a novel that flopped on me. Putting me at age sixteen, I wrote The Slayer Amongst Us. The next year I started to write another novel, but it had some themes I didn’t know how to resolve at the time. I may yet come back to it, some day. Then I graduated high school, purchased my first car, landed my first job, advanced into a college-aged group through our local church, and suddenly the real world around me got so much more interesting. And along with all that, I spent some time refining The Slayer Amongst Us. I had some friends read it and give feedback, and I got to play around with images for the front cover more.

Through the college group, I became one of many friends who went on crazy adventures, usually very late at night. We did night hiking, trips to the coast, game and movie nights, drove several hours to get a burger and fries and all sorts of crazy things. I look back at those days with lots of nostalgia. It’s taken a bucket load of intentional mental and heart work to not compare and despair at what my life is now verses what it was then. (Please don’t think I’m sappy for saying that). All in all, we had a lot of fun and a few of those friends are still very good friend of ours.

Did you notice I said “ours” right there at the end? That’s cause I happened to marry one of my friends from our college group. We had met in high school, but we really got to know each other in the college group. He’s wonderful, even more wonderful than I thought he was when I first met him. For the sake of my family’s privacy, everyone is getting an initial. His is D. I’m not going to go into everything, but we dated for a little while (golly maintaining a dating relationship is so hard!), and then we got married.  About a month and a half later, we found out we were pregnant. Before we knew it, someone at the hospital told us it was okay to take our freshly-born daughter (E) home. 

Thus began the hardest jobs I’ve taken on yet. Motherhood and homemaker. 

Within the first year of E’s life, we went from renting an apartment to buying and rebuilding a home located in a safe small town. And the month before we moved, we were pregnant again. E was eight months old. We’ve settled in nicely. We love our town. We love our neighbors. We love the small community park that we can walk to.

 That is where I have been. 

It’s been all this time, and I’m just now wanting to do something related to writing. But this time I don’t have a great character or interesting storyline or creative world that I’m planning to expound on. In fact, I don’t have any novel ideas. Rather, I have the idea of just writing about my life, some experiences, thoughts and cares. We’ll see how much time I actually get to sit down and write. We’ll see what comes into my head to put on the page. But no matter what, I hope you come away from our time together encouraged, maybe inspired, and at the very least, a bit entertained. 

I’ll catch you on the flip-flop.