How Did We Get Here?

 I'm a writer who didn't write for ten years. Even to me, that's a little unbelievable, and I lived it. 

My first teaching position was middle school English, which meant teaching prepositions, sentence structures, punctuation, and capitalization. It wasn't the most exciting part of language arts. There's only so much fun you can have with the parts of speech (not much at all). But I enjoyed writing, and over the course of five years, I wrote and rewrote a sprawling mess of a high fantasy.

I joined writing groups (this was pre-Facebook, so they were bulletin boards). I read agent and editor blogs, researched markets, wrote my query letter, several synopses, and set my glorious first novel into the query trenches.

It did have partial requests (surprising, since it was long). The full manuscript never made it farther than my hard drive (deservedly so). I'd racked up more than my million words on it. I'd learned quite a bit about how books go from idea to publication. I should have turned around, put my hair up, and written another book, but like many authors who spend years on one idea, it was hard to write another. The first one had been swirling through my head for years before I started writing it. I couldn't detach.

I also had a high-risk pregnancy that nearly killed me, followed by other struggles. Writing wasn't a priority when I was in new-mom survival mode while still teaching 13-year-olds how to use semicolons. I set writing aside. I picked it up sporadically, but as we planned and had more babies, and I decided to homeschool, I switched from one busy lifestyle to another. There wasn't much left for writing.

One morning, when my fifth (yes, fifth) baby was not-quite-two, I was at the pool for swimming lessons. While #5 played with another toddler, I struck up a conversation with the child's mom. I'd pulled out some old ideas I'd jotted down over the years and played with them, but I wasn't sure where I was going, or if I wanted to commit to a novel again. But this mom also wrote, and she also couldn't make it to the town's writing group, and along with our toddlers, we had other children who were similar ages. 

We started meeting at the park and exchanging pages. That was five books ago for me. I wrote a high fantasy "Stand-alone" that grew to a trilogy and then a quartet (that story is for another post). I wrote several short stories for indie anthologies, then started on another novel, which is now in the hands of my publisher. 

I sometimes look back with regret on all those years I didn't write. Logically, I know my head wasn't in the right place for it. They weren't wasted years, because I spent them reading various nonfiction topics while also teaching my children (we're up to six now, although we've put them in public school (also another post)). We're all neurodivergent here, which means I've had to learn about all the types of ADHD, the ways autism presents, how to teach reading to people with dyslexia, and math to those with dyscalculia. 

I know myself better than I did all those years ago, and that's essential for writing. I'm not the youngest, showiest new face in writing, but I know what I like, and that's what I write.