I’m just popping my head in here to proclaim myself still alive (I blog, therefore I am?)

Work.

It is all work’s fault.  And I’m talking about the day job work, not the writing work. I do both, and I love both, but one energizes me like nothing else, and the other can sap my very energy to a point that not even a bottle of No-Doze can rescue me. Guess which one I’ve been mired in lately?

The good news is that the day job is cyclical, and that cycle is about to wind down so my writing cycle can heat up.  I can’t wait.  Summer is approaching. It’s my favorite season. I really dislike cold weather, which, as a Chicagoan, is a terrible conundrum, so when summer finally comes, I feel like my soul takes off its winter coat and awakes from its slumber.

This summer is also very special to me because it was last summer that I began on this commercial writing adventure.  There was a story knocking around in my head that demanded to be realized.  It had been trapped in there for years, born on the streets of Madrid during one of the most liberating periods of my life.  Last summer, I was struggling with how to fold my new identity of “mom” in with the rest of me, but somewhere between motherhood and my workplace identity was . . .  something absent.  And last summer, I decided to find out what that absence was and make it a presence.

So without really knowing what I was doing, I opened a Word document and typed a letter. The letter became a word; the word became a sentence; the sentence became a paragraph. Three months later, I looked up, and I had written a novel.  Over the next six months, that novel got cleaned up, revised, and queried, and now it is with a publisher under consideration. Will it eventually get published? I don’t know. Things move at a snail’s pace in the publishing industry, and frankly, that’s ok with me. Because in the meantime, I wrote another story, and another one, and started a third.  So here I am, almost a year later, three complete manuscripts under my belt, and a presence there between mother and worker: writer.

Ah, summer.