Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts

June 16, 2018

When life hands you lemons, you write stories.

If you know me at all, both in the real world and online, you know life has thrown me many curve balls lately. It started around March 1st when my cousin's dog got a little too excited when he saw my mom and knocked her over onto their cement driveway, breaking her pelvic bone. She couldn't walk for a few weeks, and that set off a chain reaction of new health issues and complicated some stuff she was already dealing with. I won't get into her business here, but I'll sum it by saying I didn't get any sleep for nearly three months, she ended up in the ER six times, and she spent something like 20 nights in the hospital. Maybe more — I lost count. And while there were some scary days mixed in there, she's still here and actually getting better, so I'm thankful for that.

In the midst of it all, my Jeep decided to start going dead at random times. In the middle of busy intersections, at stoplights, in parking lots, in heavy traffic — there was no rhyme or reason to it. It happened dozens of times. Whether or not it would start back up was anyone's guess. I took it to four separate mechanics, and each and every one of them claimed there was nothing wrong. The last guy charged me hundreds to fix something that may have been the culprit, but two days after I drove it out of his shop, it started doing it all over again. When your mom's in the hospital (or has three or four medical appointments a week), and you have no siblings or significant other to depend on for help, having a vehicle that breaks down on railroad tracks at 9 p.m. and on busy highways at 8 a.m. in Atlanta traffic isn't ideal. Thankfully, I am now driving a new SUV, and I thank God for it every time it gets me from one place to another and back home again. 

And in the midst of all that, I lost my job in probably the most terrible way possible. I've worked as a freelance writer for the last nine years, and for approximately the last five or so of those years, I've worked almost exclusively for one client. It wasn't my dream job, but I enjoyed it enough, it opened many personal and professional doors for me, and I dedicated an embarrassing amount of time to it. I won't go into the details of what happened, but essentially a higher up person threw me and a few others under the bus to save her own ass. Other people who worked there tried to come to bat for me, but it became painfully clear after a few days that there was nothing I could do about it. I was collateral damage for something that was beyond my control.

I was devastated.

Many other things happened in the midst of all this job/car/mama drama. I spent a couple of weeks with the flu. A tornado ripped through my parents' property. One of my closest friends lost her mom. I nearly killed my poor sweet dog. A hawk did kill one of my poor chickens. My social life became just me calling a few friends, relatives, and neighbors and asking if they could pick my mom up from whatever appointment because I was stranded in a parking lot. And I could go on, but I won't, because I know it could always be so much worse. It just seemed like it got to a point where I woke up and wondered what was going to go wrong that day. I will say I had big and specific plans for this year — huge life-changing plans — and I watched them all get picked off, one by one, as the last few months rolled by. The only thing I really had left was a plan to buy a house later this year.

And last week, just as I began to try to settle back into a normal routine so I could actually afford that house, the person who planned to sell it to me texted me and said she needed to talk. Long story short, she's decided she wants to live in in the house herself. I am actually okay with that. It's one of my favorite people, and she's lived out of state for too long now. I'll get to spend more time with her and her family. But at the same time, it felt like the last little dangling hope for my year was shot down. I wasn't sure whether I should laugh or cry.

I think I spent the rest of the day trying to come up with a plan B. Maybe I should go back to school. Maybe I should fix up my parents' old house and move into it. Maybe I should try again to beg for my old job. To be honest, I've been offered several jobs since losing that one, but I was either not in a place to take them because of everything going on, or those offers came from previous clients who were rude and awful to work for, and I couldn't bring myself to say yes. But maybe it was time to suck it up and do something I would hate. I had no idea what else to do with myself.

After moping around like some sort of emo 14-year-old for a few days, something occurred to me. Maybe I need to stop coming up with plan B. Maybe it's time to get back to plan A.

Like I said, I've been supporting myself as a writer for nearly a decade. It's been great. Sort of. I have a ton of flexibility, but I'm not writing the things I want to write. I've penned stories about everything from politics to Pottery Barn. Somewhere in there, many years ago, I also wrote a novel. And at some point, I started shopping around for agents and such, and it wasn't all negative. But life got in the way, and work got in the way, and I put it all on hold for a moment. And before I knew it, that moment was four or five years long.

I kept telling myself I'd get back to it after this or after that, but after those things, something else would come up. I had so many ideas floating around in my head for more stories, but the few times I'd take a night and try to do something with them or go back to my old novel to fix it up, I'd find myself writing in the style of whatever I'd written for my paying job that day. I'd lost my own voice.

Thankfully, it wasn't gone forever.

What I haven't mentioned yet is that after I lost my job in March and went through all the phases of grief, something sparked inside of me. All of these ideas I've had floating around in my head came to the surface with so much new inspiration behind them. Even though life was really tough, this wave of creativity came over me. All I wanted to do is write for myself. I had some savings to keep me afloat, so I'd tell myself that I could spend this week working on a story I've always wanted to write, but next week I'd take one of the crappy job offers. And the next week, I'd say okay, you can work on these stories again, but next week you're taking one of the crappy job offers.

I couldn't stop working on the stories. And I also knew I couldn't keep going because I had a house to buy in a few months, and I needed to be working one or some of those crappy writing jobs so I could pay for it.

But I don't have a house to buy anymore. I literally have no concrete plans for the rest of the year at this point because of the way everything happened in March, April, and May. At first, the idea made me miserable. Now that I've had time to reflect, I'm thinking maybe that's not such a bad thing. Maybe it's time for me to buckle down and work on plan A — writing what I want to write — without worrying about backups for a while.

I do have a few odd freelance writing jobs I do here and there for people I like working for, and it's easy work. It's not going to buy me a house (or anything beyond food and utilities for that matter), but it's enough to pay my basic bills, and I really only have to work no more than 10-20 hours a week. I'm basically taking a 80 percent pay cut if I did the math correctly, but maybe I don't have to place weekly Sephora orders or buy every book Amazon has ever recommended right now.  Maybe I can work part-time for a few months and spend the rest of time dedicated to what I really want out of life for once instead of putting so much effort into my backups.

If the last few months have taught me anything, though, it's that you never know what's going to happen from day to day. So, I'm not going to make any promises, but I'd like to revisit my old novel and spend some time on the new one I've started. One is super light and airy Southern fiction and one is super dark and teeters between horror and thriller, so that's fun. I've also got some essays and short stories I've been writing and putting together. Who knows if I'll get anywhere with them, but the idea of dedicating time to work on them is exciting.

One last thing. JT Ellison, one of my favorite authors to read and follow on social media, always posts great advice for writers on her website and beyond. Her online presence has been a bit of a bible for me for several years. This week, right around the time this whole idea came to me, she posted this: The Process Begins by Actually Sitting Down. It couldn't have come at a better moment and felt like the final bit of guidance I needed for this new plan. This needs to be my mantra before I fall back into the same old habits that prevented me from writing before. I may not be working in the traditional sense, but if I'm doing to succeed, writing my stuff needs to be my job.