New Beginnings and Old Stories

I'm so glad to be back. I'll admit all the not blogging about writing, not thinking about writing, not worrying about whether or not the laundry would get done because I was writing went away for a while and I was glad. It was stressful to do those things. I had the handy excuse of moving my family to another state in the middle of the school year to concentrate on, and I could hand off at least my blogging duties to the immensely capable writers I blog with.
I was so filled with relief that it surprised me a bit to find that once the dust had settled and my internet connection restored, my first thought was of writing. Of course it helped that I attended my first ANWA meeting, where the amazingly talented (and published!) chapter president Jennifer Griffith had made me so welcome, as well as the other lovely ladies in the group. 

So I feel a bit restored to writing, like coming back home after a stay in the hospital. You're still not entirely well (if only you could see the boxes upon boxes scattered in my house right now), but you feel you're on the mend, anxious to begin living a normal life again.

And I realize that my normal life does now, in fact, include writing. Somehow. Everyday. Even if life's requirements keep me from sitting at the computer and actually writing something in a WIP, I will think about it. I'll think about where the story stopped, where the characters are, what the next stop is. I think about it, dwell on it, and wonder if it's possible to make time flow a little slower so I can find more seconds in the day to put words on the screen. So though I'm not published, and by most writerly standards would not be considered a writer, in my heart I am one. I have stories to tell. And tell them I will. Someday.

So in this beginning anew, I come back to old stories. Stories that are in progress but have stopped for some reason, usually my own fear of success, and getting bogged down in the middle of the story. I can see, as a reader, all the plot threads, the weavings of characters in the warp and weft of the writer's cloth. I can follow them with my finger, feeling the tug of loose fibers as I follow them from beginning to end. But I am not yet practiced enough in the craft to weave it for myself. I need more practice to keep the yarns from bunching up and causing an awful ugly tangle in the middle of my rug. But as I have not looked at my half-finished projects, I can see better now that I'm further away from the process how to clean it up and move on. So today is that day, where I move on. I will move further in the WIP, if only because I know that's the only way I can trully combine my inner knowledge of my "writerliness" with what the outside definintion is of a writer.