I decided if I am going to Kidlitcon in a few weeks (and I am) and since it is a conference about and for bloggers, it might be a good idea for me to jump back into the blogging waters. Here goes.
I’ve probably started this blog post 20 times over the last week. I tried a Cassie post and a house post and even considered a garden post. I tried writing about the current WIP, a YA verse novel. I tried writing about the new character that just started speaking to me that has to wait. I tried writing about a lot of things but what would usually happen is that I’d get a few sentences down and I’d decide that it wasn’t witty enough for a come-back-to-blogging post.
So life, the short version.
Lots of stuff done around the house. Lots of stuff not done around the house. Susan got happy. Susan got sad. Some things changed. Some things didn’t. Life goes on. The end.
The slightly longer version. We now have a stair railing so Cassie won’t launch herself sideways off the staircase on the way down. However the guy that installed it cut the carpet wrong and now all the carpet on the stairs have to be replace. The first arguement with the painter came over varnishing the banister (one coat is good enough, right? And who really notices the bumps in the wood when you run your hand up and down the rail?) The house interiors are painted and look beautiful. The bathroom cabinets are painted and look like crap and need to be redone by a different painter (who will also be redoing the banisters.) The colors I picked for the walls are just what I wanted, however some of it ended up in places that weren’t walls. The colors on the fireplace in the new dining room, not so much. New chairs for the new sitting area are finally the ordered but the rugs are eluding me, probably because I’m not willing to pay a thousand dollars for a rug that Cassie will, at one point or another, throw up on. The wood floor is still not installed and is another month away. In the meantime furniture is bunched up in places, left from when we had to move it for the painters. Cassie’s play area has shrunk by half because there are boxes of all the stuff we took off the walls for the painting and won’t be put back up until the tile is demoed. It feels like we just moved in but were told we couldn’t unpack for a couple of months. The built-in bookcases for the library were scheduled to be delivered/installed the weekend I’m at kidlitcon so that’s being pushed out another week too. In the meantime the old bookcases in the library have been partially dismantled and moved into my husband’s office for his book collection which leaves a few thousand books in the library stacked willy-nilly.
It is, as you can imagine, exhausting.
What does this have to do with writing? Nothing and everything. The single thing I am sure about myself as a writer is that my very best writing is when I rip my guts wide open and let them spill on the page.
The book I’m writing about right now is inspired by my father poems written last April for National Poetry Month. It’s inspired by finding my sister and my brothers and aunts and uncles and oh so many cousins that I found when I located my father’s obituary. It’s inspired by my own life and some of the questions I had as a child, questions that have never, and now, will never be answered.
While all this work has been going on around the house there have been confrontations that I have worked hard to avoid, many times I bit my tongue, telling myself to pick my battles. There have been compromises from what I wanted to have done to what we could afford to have done to what was even possible to have done considering the eccentricities of our house. Prices of things have doubled then tripled and electricians who should have been done in a couple of weeks were here for over a month.
Thank goodness I’m writer. All that emotion, all that, I’ll say it, anger, it has to go somewhere.
What better place to put it in than in a book?
It’s so good to see you here, Susan. And I’m thrilled to hear that you’re working some more with those father poems. It’s going to be an amazing book.
And yes, writing can be a good place to put anger.
Thanks, Amy. So very hard to get back into it because one, I want to be careful what I put out there since it stays forever and two, I find it harder to write about non-writing things so when I’m not writing a lot, blogging falls apart. Sigh.
I appreciate the kind words on the father poems. I hope it all comes together.
I love seeing bits of your on facebook, but love getting the longer version here. I’m sorry there have been such disappointments and anger with house remodeling, (if not surprised) but do look forward to seeing how they come out in your poems.
And I’m so so very excited to get to see you in Minneapolis!!!
Thanks, Jeannine. I’m feeling so disconnected from the kidlit world but I have no one to blame but myself.
So you are really going to go to kidlitcon too? Yay! I’m so looking forward to meeting you. Not sure when you are arriving but I’m coming in on Thursday and going to an event at the Kerlan convention with Laura Salas that night and we’ll be available for drinks and talk after.
That’s so much to handle all at once: the emotions of your writing project, the frustrations of your house project, all of it at once. Yowza.
I’m glad to see you here, Susan. I totally understand the paralysis that comes with not blogging for a while (which is why I try to keep myself at it, even with short, silly whatevers, just so I don’t hit that wall).
Thanks, Tracy. I really need to learn to try the short, silly whatevers but I second-guess myself all the time.