No Excuses

I haven’t been writing. I may have touched my work in progress a handful of times since I managed to “fail” NaNoWriMo in November.

My excuses are many.

Laundry. Cleaning. Repeat.

I have part-time gigs I picked up and happen to absolutely love. I dog walk. In one case, it an adorable Shitzu that finds sprawling under the shade of a tree much more beneficial than actually walking her short little legs. Luckily her owner and I know attention is attention and I’m there to give her pets, let her poop outside and continue to take terrible selfies.

Computers. About a year or so I decided to buy my own laptop with my own money. My income is pretty small so therefore the laptop was not expensive, but it was mine. I don’t have many issues with our family MacBook except I just need to have my own device dedicated to writing.

But it died. I tried to factory reset it. Boom. Black screen of death. Since its memory is nil, I packed it away so I didn’t continue to waste time getting mad trying to fix it. I continuously close out of windows I didn’t open on our family Mac and downloaded a trial of a new writing platform because Word drives me insane. And gmail makes me feel like I am working again. I just can’t do it. I trialed Scrivener and fell in love.

Even with my writing buddy walking across my keyboard in a successful attempt to get me to pet him, but refusing to remove his bow tie collar much to his dismay, I wrote. And I’m going to add that to my schedule of shuttling children, cleaning, weeding, trying to survive my days when two girls are shouting at each other for one just looking the wrong direction.

I tend to forget one thing. I’m often so focused on my kids, dinner, making sure we have all appointments and medications accounted for, making sure I’m home in time for the next thing…

I forget to breathe. I forget that just hiding in my iPhone games or books isn’t really helping, just distracting. And don’t start me on my love/hate of Facebook.

I need to breathe. I need to listen to silence once in awhile. I need to get covered in dirt in my gardening. And I need to create. My brain needs to create to be whole.

And because I don’t need more pressure on myself to write a book in a month or even a year I don’t care if it means I play with word art and create a beautiful drawing of the lyrics in my favorite song. Some days it may mean painting. Or coloring. Or drawing with sidewalk chalk with my kids. Or typing on a manuscript. But I need to create. I find myself again when I do.

And that makes me happy.