Get back to writing!

I’ve been MIA too long – I let life interfere with writing here. Saturday was my first ever yard sale! I did fairly well and I carted everything that didn’t sell to Goodwill yesterday. Cleaning out the attic precipitated the sale. I’m in the process of completing my memoir and there was a letter my father had written to me years ago that I couldn’t find anywhere in the house, so up in the attic I went to sort through at least 15 boxes of memories. My one-minute story: my mother passed away when I was 14; my father remarried; my aunt, who had become like a mother to me, passed away in 1999; and my father, who was my last anchor in life, passed away in 2005. There is much more to fill in the gaps, but that’s where the memoir comes in! Anyway, this letter he wrote was right before I moved to South Carolina and it was something I would never had expected from him. Upon finding the letter, I feel I can now finish the book and move on to the next step – finding an agent.

October has been and will continue to be a hectic month for me, but I found myself yesterday repeating a line I swore I would never say again: “I need to find the time to write.” No sooner was it coming out of my mouth that I realized I was making an excuse and allowing other non-important events to dictate my time. I had always used the excuse that I didn’t have the time to write because I was too busy with my outside job, cleaning the house, washing dishes, doing laundry – you name it. I finally realized the writing needs to come first or it will never come at all. If I want to eventually make a living as a freelance writer, all other things will have to take a backseat to writing. Period! It is part of “getting off the treadmill” – realizing what it is that’s keeping you from moving forward and having the courage to change it. I’m off work today, so I made it a priority to sit down and write first thing this morning. I’m diving back into the memoir to add some more to it. I bumped up my deadline to get it to an agent to the end of the year and I mean it this time. While I had an editor review it who suggested some changes, I need to move forward with I believe is right.