It's Been One Year Since I Wrote This Blog

Hello There Stranger!
 
You might (or might not) remember my love/hate relationship with earworms…
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​I’ve had that song stuck in my head since I wrote the title of this long-awaited blog post. You can sing along if you’d like.

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​Not Writing With Purpose

​I spent the last year purposefully not writing. Why you might ask? There are a couple of reasons, but the biggest one was that my youngest child was in his senior year of high school, and I knew that, in a year of significant changes, I wanted to focus on what was to come next.

We were about to become empty-nesters. What did it mean? What would I do with all my free time now that I would no longer have children to care for? Who would I be?

I've never been one that lacked identity. I'm rarely bored. Sure, I've felt the guilt that most stay-at-home-moms feel when their husband slaves away at work every day. But that guilt was assuaged by dirty diapers, screaming toddler cage matches, and endless laundry. I won't even mention "the homework years."

After 23 years of SAHM life, all of that is over, and I find myself wondering what is to become of me. Now that the pressure of finding time to write is gone, will I write all the time? Will I be cranking out giant tomes of fiction and poetry? Will I twiddle away the hours waiting for inspiration to strike? Will inspiration strike ever again?

Last year felt very strange to not have some sort of writing project in the works. I'd had one for the previous 12 years, and now...nothing.

I did maintain my notebooks where I would occasionally jot down ideas, but nothing really screamed at me from the creative well. To be honest, that is what scares me the most.

The creative muscle has atrophied. Yikes!

Enter THE BIG MOVE
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My husband and I realized we had nothing anchoring us to our house in Sturbridge, and there was no logical reason for him to make the roughly 2-hour commute each way most days of the week. In order to improve his work/home life balance,  we decided to make a huge lifestyle change and move into downtown Boston. 

I now find myself in a downtown high rise (a very nice high rise, I must say) living within a 920 square foot studio with a pretty good view of the city. No children at home. No 4 bedroom house to keep clean. No garden to putter around in when I’m procrastinating the current writing project. Regrets? Nope.

Well—maybe I miss the garden a little bit.

My challenge going forward is to discover my writing life again but in entirely alien (and exciting) surroundings. I have enrolled in an online screenwriting class, just to get the creative juices flowing, and so far it's going well. And now I have an entire city to explore!

I hope to continue adding to this blog regularly, probably depicting my new writing life about a country girl in the city, or an empty-nester in the city, or something like that.

As always, I have no idea if anyone ever reads these posts, hence the title Soliloquy, but if you do, please let me know.