A Tragic Summer

Hello Word Lovers! I know it’s been a minute since I’ve posted anything. But everything shall be revealed! I had four life events happen since the last time we spoke. I even had a few posts written and ready to go, but never got around to uploading to the blog. Yeah, I’ve scolded myself for this.

I’ll start with why I couldn’t finish NaNoWriMo last year. I had recently started a new job that was a bit far to travel. Only to find out that I was pregnant weeks after starting it. We had been trying for the last few years with the first two pregnancies ending in miscarriage. With this being a high-risk pregnancy due to previous issues and my age, I had to make the decision to leave my new job as they were unyielding of much-needed bathroom breaks during the first trimester.

Fast forward to May, I got married to the man I loved of nine years and everything was great. We moved into a bigger house that had room for not just our family of four, but for our new addition.

But sadly, five years to the day that I lost my beloved grandmother, I found out my daughter had passed away at thirty-seven weeks. I was devastated and heartbroken. I fell into my grief headfirst not knowing which way was up.

As things started to normalize themselves, two months later my husband’s ex-wife suddenly died. They had two teenage boys together, that we shared custody of. The youngest, fourteen lived with us. While the oldest, seventeen, stayed with his mother. By him being autistic, we felt that it was best he stayed at the school he was comfortable with. But her death changed all that, we now had to get through our grief of losing the baby. Now we also had to help them process their mother’s death and the oldest moving across state lines with us.

What path to take?

I was floored. I only knew that I was taking a few months for not only my body to heal but my soul as well. And now I had a special needs teenager to get settled. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a great young man. It’s the fourteen-year-old who is crazed with puberty that’s the hard work. But getting a special needs kid transferred from the school system in Georgia to Florida, THAT is a headache.

It took me three weeks to get anyone in my county to even talk to me! And while this is going on, I’m trying to figure out what do I want in life. Do I try again for another baby? Do I go get a small job, so I can be home when our oldest gets home? Do I go back into the corporate world after he’s gotten his routine under his belt?

All these questions swarmed through my head for weeks, and my always active mind wouldn’t let me rest until I had answered them. All I know, is I want to be a published author. That my stories must be shared with the world. It was just hard to bring myself to write, all throughout my pregnancy and now with this deep grief.

 

I found myself in the fire of life.

 

“Hey, this is supposed to be a blog about the pitfalls of writing!”

Ah, but it is my good friend! See I promised to tell the truth about writing a novel and the struggles of life that might make it harder. Processing grief is one of them.

The death of my Grandmother left me a shell of a person, that is until my pregnancy. Though I did not have the energy to write, and I found out that pregnancy brain is a real thing, I knew that I wanted to expand my writing.

My little girl made me think about writing children’s books that she could see herself in. Though I could not form a creative sentence, I could plot my writing career that involved writing what is missing from the world of books.

The fire of life had engulfed me, burned me to ash. But from that pile of ash, I arose. My mind going on and on about what I wanted and NEEDED out of my life. See before, I was just a writer, wanting to share my crazy stories with people. But how can you share stories if you’re ever afraid of critique and failure?

From failing, we learn. And I have learned a lot! I had failed as a blogger, my first shot of introducing myself to the world. I treated my blog as just a diary, not giving any real deep thought to it. Not being consistent with my post. Much like how I never wrote much in my real diary growing up. All it took was for my cousin to break the flimsy lock one time and I never wrote in it again. Here, I had the opposite, I wasn’t getting the traffic I wanted so I let the blog go during my pregnancy.

But I realized once most of the tears had dried up, that I loved writing, I was born to write.

Getting down to business

The great takeaway of all this is, death has a way of changing one’s priorities. It changes the way we view life by breaking the rose-colored lens. All the time, life is screaming “Look at ME!” but we are too busy not looking and not really enjoying what is offered. We let great opportunities go by that life offers because of fear or being stuck on just one small facet of what we want.

But I figured out what I want out of life and it is being a great writer, full time. And I learned that I have to treat this as a business if I want this to work. Yes, that means I tip my toe back into the waters of working a 9-5. In doing so, I get the capital I need to expand my empire, my brand. I get to expand my knowledge with books, workshops, and courses. Most importantly, I get to go back out into the world and observe life. Which is a writer’s greatest tool, experiencing what happens around us. How can we write effectively if we only use google?

Writing is about life experiences, get out and have some!

That’s all for today word lovers!