Looking in the Mirror without Toilet Paper

Nothing like a global pandemic and three weeks off work to make you take a look at your life.

The last time I posted to this blog was November, 2017. My last story sale was longer ago than that. Every time I refer to myself as a writer these days I have to check whether my nose grew. I haven’t been much of one. Teaching, parenting, and husbanding have taken up the lion’s share of my time, with a new hobby of Dungeons & Dragons slurping up what puddles remain. I have a lot more excuses than I have keyboard hours. That’s no way to be a writer.

So what brings me here in 2020? A sudden abundance of free time. Hopefully I’m not the only one socially distancing himself for the good of slowing down COVID-19’s plundering of the world. So what’s a guy to do when he has three weeks away from his day job? Put in some hours with his night job, of course. No, not fighting crime. Writing!

The two and a half years since I last blogged haven’t been completely devoid of writing. I’ve tinkered on some stories, even sent a few out to add to my rejection pile. I’ve started sponsoring my school’s Creative Writing Club, too, which has been incredibly rewarding and probably owed a lot of credit for my fingers finding the keyboard today. I’ve done a few panels at a few Cons. All of those things are more writer-adjacent though. Writers do one thing: write. That hasn’t been happening.

Even this blog post isn’t really writing. Nor is the vicious word-assassination I’ve engaged in to pare down two 750-word stories to 500 for the upcoming Escape Pod Flash Fiction Contest (improving one, making the other look like a toddler that cut her own hair). Nor is the tiny bit of editing I did to the novelette I just sent to one of the few magazines that still accepts that length. (Did I call it a novella in my cover letter? Oops.) They are, however, writing-adjacent tasks that I wanted to get off my plate so I could hit my writing with both barrels over the next couple weeks of social isolation.

Let’s face it, I’ve taken more than one look at my life this week and wondered if I’m on the last chapter. I don’t think so: I’m young-ish and healthy-ish. Even if I catch the virus, it’s unlikely to be the end of me. That doesn’t stop a man from looking back and considering if he’s been enough. I’ll admit, I’ve had a pretty good run. Great kid, fantastic wife, eighteen years of teaching, a couple dozen published stories…

But that last one doesn’t satisfy. Ten years ago, I was a “Writer of the Future”. Well it’s the future now. Heck, the grocery stores look like we’re in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, so it must be the future. How am I less a writer now than I was then?

This is where the excuses come in, but mostly it’s that I haven’t prioritized writing in my daily life. Now when I look at the big tapestry, that writing part is missing. Or it’s a few threads where I was intending a prominent feature.

So here I am, at the loom of life overdoing this metaphor on my blog — my writer blog. Tomorrow morning I’ll be back at this keyboard working on a story, writing new words, new pages, new chapters. I didn’t give up on being a writer. Unfortunately it took a disaster to remind me of that. I’m going to focus on getting a book published before we have another one of these come through. Then it can be my book that people reach for when the hoarders get all the toilet paper. (Why, what have you been using?)