My life post teaching career has shifted incrementally but consistently since the big change.  I’m not sure if it’s like aftershocks or more like when something settles back down after really being tossed around.  It’s been exactly a year.  Today is the last day of school and I never went back once, not to visit students, not to visit friends.  I have simply been too busy.  Well, that can happen when one changes everything about their whole routine and begins a new career from scratch.

Piece by piece I’ve been figuring out how to live my life and how (maybe!) I’m going to be successful as a writer.  Also, I’ve been figuring out how I want to be successful as a writer.  I’ve begun a new project but I wondered how it would serve to help me get published.

Then I realized that didn’t matter.

It matters that I write.

Then, for the last two weeks, I have gone from writing every day to writing less and less and then by the second week none at all.

Usually what happens in times likes these, times when my life get difficult and I need to deal with it instead, the wool suit slips on.

The wool suit is my arch nemesis.  TWS is the feeling I get, uncomfortable in my own skin, when I’m not writing.  It’s that itchy and increasingly painful feeling against my skin.  It’s the metaphor for knowing that there is something else, something more important, that I should be doing.  I’m also convinced that TWS is diabolically responsible for those times and those thoughts, (house to clean, garden to weed, errands to run…) that stop me from writing.

This break, however, began as just that.  I needed a writing vacation.  It’s okay to say that.  Because I dreamed.  I dreamed about my play, I came up with a working title for the next novel I will work on, and I came up with a new strategy for getting published and possibly a fun challenge to get myself there.  More on that later, but I will tell you it involves the fact that I need to build my writing resume.  I gotta get published so I can get published.  Makes sense, right?

Then, these last couple of days I found myself cranky.  I found myself not dreaming, but pissing and moaning about all that I should be doing.  I felt ready to get writing again.  And guess what?  I did just that.

Ahhhhh.  Silk is so lovely.