Finishing the Past, Finding the Future

My cabin shed needs fixing.

The wood on the roof is sagging, and the shingles need replacing. It’s filled with my family's belongings—Mom's move from her condo to the nursing home, Judy moving back home, our own move from the house to the condo—so it needs to get done.

It's also been this way for over three years. I've needed to do the work, but my family’s health took precedence.

I'd love to put it off a little while longer and enjoy the lake. But now it's raining, things are leaking, and the work can't be put off any more.

It feels like a good metaphor for my writing life.

Finishing the past

Like the shed, I've fallen behind on my work with Counios and Gane. We had hoped to release our next book a few years ago, but it was put on hold while I was dealing with my family.

Now, it's way past due. The readers are asking for it. And to be honest, my writing partner and I would also like to get it done.

So this past month, I've been focused on finishing it. I'm not great at handling multiple stories in my head, so my own personal stories had to be set aside. It's not ideal, but it is what it is.

Finding the future

But I haven't paused everything.

I continue to try to figure out how to tell people what I am doing. I keep wanting something clean and simple that I can say on the street when I run into someone.

The challenge is that I'm not taking a traditional route, and I find it hard to explain that choice. Second, the writing itself feels hard to define. It's not a mainstream genre but something more abstract.

To communicate this, I've rebuilt my homepage more times than I care to count, but working with my writing group this past month helped me craft something that feels more concrete for readers and that new visitors can latch onto.

It's not complete, but it's a first step in describing my vision.

Moving Forward

I want to get back to my own personal writing—those weird, odd stories and poems I have trouble defining. And I want to keep building on what I've started with the website.

But first, the novel needs to be finished.

And of course, there's still the shed roof—because you never know when it's going to rain again.