Thursday, March 12, 2009

Life Happens


These past six-to-ten weeks have posed, I feel, the greatest challenge I have yet faced as a writer. Between an alarming succession of health glitches--with the inevitable time, stamina, and financial complications which accompany them--finding the inspiration or even the basic motivation to write has proven something of a dilemma. How does one set firm, uncompromising goals for herself when all she seems to do is sleep? (I mean, the ideas unfold in delightful abundance, but one doesn't have the paper or pencil, at the time, to write!) Now, my girls are newly-arrived home, thankful for the respite of Spring Break, filling the space around me with an energy as well as enthusiasm that are--in and of themselves--marvelously fatiguing.
Thus, a stack of neatly organized manuscripts rest atop my desk, patiently awaiting the proverbial Red Pen. The scribbled notes from my marble composition book of "sketches" are yet to be added to their respective works. My "to do" list of contests sits to one side with not nearly so many entries crossed off as I would like, while no less than five submissions to magazines require the cover-letters and postage necessary to transform them from hapless doodlings to serious works.
And, if all this were not enough, I am exactly one-thousand-four-hundred-sixty-one words behind in maintaining my daily quota.
Maybe the greatest inhibitor in the drive to succeed--to capture those stories, thoughts, images and concepts one hopes will captivate, entertain, move, even inspire--is that sheer, inexorable reality of existence:
Life Happens.
If it didn't, however, there would be nothing about which to write.