Whew!

Wow, it has been a minute. I took the summer off from blogging, and then I was so into this new book I’m working on that the break ended up bleeding into the fall too. But I feel like I’m firmly into revisions now, so I can pop my head back up to say hi! I missed you all and I missed this.

Unfortunately, I don’t feel like I have a lot of interesting content to blog about right now. Life outside of me is full, full, full. I am firmly in the chauffeur stage of parenting, and that combined with being homework monitor, chef for never-ending appetites, and part-time amateur therapist for middle school drama means that every day sort of passes by in a blur.

My own work, however, is in a very autumn sort of stage. I sit down every day, do my writing until my brain goes to mush, and then I spend the rest of my time being a sort of zombie while some small part of my mind nibbles at whatever narrative problem I’ve got going on.

This book, you guys. I’ve had to restart it twice, changed the narrator three times - back and forth and back again - and I feel like I’ve had to chisel it out of granite rather than letting it grow from soft soil. Some of that’s my fault. I decided at some point that I was going to set a hard and fast word goal and unfortunately didn’t include the truly essential quiet thinking time that is needed to turn words into stories.

Some of the difficulty is the story itself. I’m calling it my midlife crisis book, and it’s about a bunch of women - ordinary, normal women, who get called into some supernatural spy action twenty years after graduating from college together. There are a lot of cobwebs in their lives - corners that have been left untouched for a long time, but new challenges shine some light on the messy parts of life that they maybe wanted to pretend didn’t exist.

It’s fun to write, but hard, too. How do you do justice to the truth of so many of our stories - that choices were made, paths were followed, but if something big enough happens, we all have to figure out what parts of ourselves are still helping us, and what parts are holding us back?

Over these months, one of our family’s projects has been to shift our house from the kid years into a more streamlined living space. New paint, new couches, new storage, and a lot of sorting - toys, clothes, and so much kid artwork. It’s been fun to remake everything, and the girls are in on it too, but there’s a lot of decisions - do we still need a dedicated area for scrunchies and headbands, or should we use that space to hold the hair products and flat iron? What parts of our house are still helping us and what parts are holding us back?

I hope that in six months or a year, this process will be done and we’ll reach a new normal. But of course, the girls are talking about how it’s been a few years and they’d really like to have their rooms repainted and maybe we should think about reorganizing the kitchen and, and, and. I guess even if it slows down, there will always be another change just around the corner. Another adjustment, another life stage to get used to.

That’s not such a bad thing, I guess. It’s good to keep those cobwebs at bay, after all.