Here I have been waiting for a return to normalcy with bated breath. Maybe normalcy is the wrong word, since normal has some very untoward synonym cousins like average, run-of-the-mill, common, typical, and conventional...all words I doubt very many people would be scrambling to affix to their lives. So if not normalcy, then what? Routine? Structure?
Its been three months since I've written or even glanced at my blog. At first it was nothing more than a minor neglect, like not feeding your goldfish for a day. You feel guilty, but its not the end of the world. Even if you forget the next day, your goldfish won't die. And then its been a week, then two weeks, then close to three months. If your goldfish is alive, which he probably isn't, he's super pissed and ready to settle the score. Its easy to forget about him, floating in his little bowl, not a care in his average life, and then when you least expect it, you get home from your dinner and a movie date and he's upside down. You think Jesus, all I needed to do was sprinkle a little of that weird smelling flaky fish food in there but two or three times a week, and this all could have been prevented.
Well, I logged back into my blogger account, and lo and behold, Interrobang still exists. Zero page views in months (obviously), a little dusty, but by no means floating upside down, so its time to sprinkle some food into its bowl.
As I mentioned, life has been a series of peaks and valleys, none of which resemble normalcy. My wife and I had our first child together on April 22nd; the little guy decided to come seven weeks early. Three blurry weeks in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, leaving my job to go on parental leave early, having very short-notice sinus surgery, and dealing with relatives, gifts, cards, questions, concerns, nurses, doctors, hospital staff all have contributed to the last three or so months being focused on something other than myself (good thing I'm not a narcissist!). All of this brouhaha has offered some extremely valuable perspective, though. Things tend to snap into focus a little bit easier when there is more on the line than mere ego (but that is still there too, in spades). So now that my son is home and working his way into an established routine, my surgery is over and quite successful (I can breathe, taste, and smell again! Maybe all of thats not so overrated after all), and my job is safety tucked away for the next eight or so months, I can finally dust off my literary hat and work on something again. Speaking of which....
Earlier this year, I decided that I really need to pull up my bootstraps and get out into the great beyond to seek out, well, for lack of a better word, kinship. No man is an island, after all. Some quick googling brought me to Meetup.com, which took me to the Victoria Creative Writing Group, which then led me to my first of several meetups amid the towering emptiness of the Atrium building downtown. Initially I was skeptical of meetup consisting of writers talking about writing, dropping bon mots and quoting Flaubert. Well, thank Christ, I was wrong. The dozen or so regulars at each meeting are eclectic, witty (though not insufferably so), interesting, and most importantly, passionate. And passion is like a disease to me, you have to have it around before you can catch it. I haven't been to a meetup in a couple of months, but returning to them is an important part of my striving for some focus in my writing.
I have been chipping away at my book here and there for the past couple of months, but my dearth of inspiration is not due to the metaphorical well drying up, which was a major fear of mine, but merely my lens being pointed at other objects, which is just fine at the moment. I am bristling with excitement to get back to writing and all that it entails. With everything happening at once in my life, it is calming to see the dust settle and to see my life, forever altered (for the better, I might add), and be able to accommodate my old passions with some new ones.
My new parent resolution is to continue to write for my blog as well as try as hard as I can to write my novel. We shall see how it goes...
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