This is the second time I've sat down to write this blog today. I wrote one earlier in the day, looked it over, nodded my head with satisfaction, hit "publish", and watched as the blog not only failed to post, but was vanished out of existence by what I can only imagine to be wicked little demons in the mothercode of Squarespace.
(Or it could be that their blogging app is still buggy crap, which it was the last time I tried to use it to blog on my phone as well, and which I am slightly grumpy about.)
I haven't been on here in a long time. To be fair, I haven't been anywhere much but my two jobs since the move from Maine to Michigan. I went from working a glorious 15-20 hours a week to 50-60 hours a week, and I'm still tightening and loosening the bolts of my life to accommodate the new stresses and strains. Still, I'm told that this is what the Real World looks like, and that businesses don't invest in themselves.
(For those of you who haven't heard, Bird is currently in the process of opening an art supply store here in Traverse City with her brother and sister-in-law: a joint venture between the three of them. It's called Hue Art + Supply, and you can read more about it here. Or you could follow them on Instagram. Just lately, their Instagram page has featured celebratory wooden dolls and vaguely psychedelic backgrounds done in watercolor by my wife. I sincerely hope things continue in the odd, fun vein they are in.)
The increase in hours has meant that I've had to reassess and re-prioritize my time and creative energy. Maine was great: I was able to write a hardboiled detective novelette, record two EPs (one noise rock, one country), finish a screenplay that I've been tinkering with for years, master my Red Beans and Rice recipe, and still have time left over to binge-watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer with Bird.
Time is still moving it's same, steady pace. I just have much less of it to spend, these days. So I've had to consider what I want to do. What I really want to do. Not just with my afternoon, or tomorrow, or for the next couple of weeks. Time has become dearer to me than that, in the past few months.
And it comes back to the words. It always comes back to the words.
I'm a writer. (A writer with a legion of time-consuming and creative hobbies, but a writer, nonetheless.) Refocusing on the words, and the work, and the stories, has shown me unequivocally, that I'm meant to be at this keyboard, at this desk, with my books and my pens and my tired eyes. In the past month, I've edited and sent out the detective story I wrote in Maine, and submitted the first screenplay I ever wrote to three of the biggest film festivals in the country. I finally finished a science fiction short story that I wrote for my father (and also, I realized when it was finished, for my grandfather, who passed away earlier this year) and sent that off to a magazine as well.
I'm writing an odd little fantasy story, now, that is secretly a science fiction story, while (also secretly) managing to be a ghost story as well. There's a strange little girl in it, and a vast, empty wood in the south of England.
It's an astonishingly beautiful summer day, bright and hot, and without a trace of autumn on the air. I have ink on my fingers again. I am drinking strong tea that tastes of cardamom and cinnamon and lemon peel, and Trinity is sleeping just beyond a splash of sunlight on the floor. Cicadas crackle like static in the hot air outside, below the trilling of little birds in the trees.
I'm writing a ghost story. I'm writing. And I am so ridiculously happy.