Tug

Mostly, I've been hiding from writing. I've been sleeping or coughing or cleaning or chasing children or counting the days until this baby will be born. But I have not been writing. This sort of avoidance could go on unchecked, I could let my writing slip into the background, I could let the documents rest indefinitely. I could. I sometimes wonder if I should, if all this time spent writing (and rewriting) the same page is ever going to be worth it.

Could I just let myself be distracted to the point that I forget why I was even writing in the first place? I think I could. Absolutely.

Thankfully, whenever I reach this point, I almost always find myself gently tugged - back to words, to this laptop, to the worlds I've left undone on the page.

Today that tug came in the form of an acceptance in the Blue Earth Review. It's completely unrelated to anything that I'm working on currently. In fact, it's a story that I started working on at Kenyon last summer. But, it's a reminder that I am a writer and that there are readers out there. That sometimes, patience is rewarded, and perhaps the rests from work that I take should not be frowned upon, but appreciated as simply the ebb and flow of my creative process.

Whenever I tend to step back from actively writing, I go through a period of submitting at random. I've always thought of it as more of a cleansing process, pushing work away from myself and out into the world. It gives me the momentary feeling of satisfaction, that though I'm not working on anything new, I'm still doing something. I'm submitting. Now, I wonder if I'm not just sending out little anchors in the hopes that one will catch a rock and pull taut, tugging me back.