Seven years??? It can't have been seven years since I have completed a blog post. That's 2019. Before Covid. (Which seems like at least 20 years ago.) I seriously cannot believe I haven't written here for seven years. And the two years before that I only published one and wrote a couple of drafts. Between 2011 and 2017 I completed over 30 posts and lost somewhere in cloudland are another 20 or so on a different site that I can no longer find.
It shouldn't surprise me. I start so many things that I don't finish--quilts, scrapbooks, cleaning out closets. Not to mention overhauling my budget, my exercise plans, and my eating habits. I am almost positive, though, that my most impressive nonaccomplishment is the amount of writing projects I have not finished.
Like almost every writer I have ever met, I have felt a (spend 20 minutes looking through an on-line thesaurus for the right word) compulsion necessity requirement desire? to write. Hmmm. More than a desire. That it's my fate, destiny, raison d'etre? Hmmm. Less than my reason to exist. (Writing is hard. Even writing about writing is hard.) Seriously, without tapping into too much spiritual existentialism, I feel like the only regret I am hauling to my grave is a feeling that I have been given a talent to use words and I have wasted it.
Consequently, every few years, I dust off my resolve and start writing. I don't love the idea. I'm insecure about my writing, even though I have won a few contests/awards and have received critiques that say I absolutely should work toward publication. Whatever. Insecurity and fear of failure don't believe that sort of folderol. Nonsense. Malarkey. (My favorite way to procrastinate writing is to browse the on-line thesaurus.)
Fine. I'll stop messing around and get to the point. Because this blog post does have a point.
In January, 2025, I was prompted (or inspired or impelled or some other dramatic word) to sign up for a writing conference to be held in May. Furthermore, I decided to enter a first chapter contest that allowed me to have three judges critique my writing. I could even win prizes. So I registered. I found two first chapters of middle grade manuscripts I wrote 25 years ago, spent not-enough-time editing them and sent them in. And then in May, I attended the conference. I hated it. I did get to play fan-girl and attend classes some of my favorite authors taught, but that only reinforced my firm belief that I was too old to write anything publishable and that I didn't belong with the other attendees who were soooo young. Younger than my children, many of them.
I received my critiques back a couple of weeks later, and was pleased that the judges didn't think that I was a horrible writer, and that their suggestions seemed doable. Then I ignored any other inclination to write anything but a weekly journal entry.
Fast forward to January, 2026. The promptings returned. I argued with those promptings to no avail. So I registered. This time I sent three chapters in to the contest. I rewrote one of the chapters that I had sent the year before, worked on another middle grade manuscript I had also started 25 years ago, and then wrote something new. A memoir called When Our Family Was in Prison. It's been many years in the making, but I have waited for the miracle to write it. The miracle? My son is eight months clean and sober and it's time to tell the story of a generous, kind, intelligent, and humane person and how depression, addiction, and an imperfect judicial system can make life almost too difficult to manage. I received the critiques from this chapter last week. All three judges emphasized that this is the book I should be writing.
Also, the incomparable Jennifer Nielsen gave a keynote address that included so much encouragement and struck down so many of the excuses authors make that keep them from writing, that I have decided that since I am a writer, I may as well write.
