TreeHouseView

In 2018, I started a blog called The Blender Family in hopes of documenting and detailing the ins and outs, ups and downs and all-arounds of step-family life.

Big dreams. Great expectations. Oh, how things change.

As with so many things, I didn’t give the blog the time and attention it needed because there were (and still are) approximately 683 other things that took my time and attention DAILY and so I let the blog slip away into oblivion, promising myself that I would circle back one day.

It looks like that day is today–welcome to life after successfully getting four boys graduated from high school and on to their adulting years! Theoretically, I should have heaps of time to devote to anything my selfish little heart desires, right? I should be able to spend hours writing and dreaming and wondering if I’ll ever have it in me to actually start editing my first love, the first book in a trilogy–Sins of the Sisters: Soul Persuasion. Or will I allow it to continue to sit, waiting to be polished enough to put out into the universe for public consumption?

It’s not writer’s block per se. It’s pure paralysis. Pure fear. Paralyzing fear of failure. Fear of judgement. And add in a healhty dose of laziness if I’m being completely 100% honest. Probably some imposter syndrome on the side…

That makes for one slap-happy recipe for failure, now doesn’t it? So here I am, wading back into the waters of writing again…trying to battle through the flotsam and jetsam to get to open waters and smooth sailing. I’m pretty damn sure most interesting writing doesn’t come from smooth waters.

My cousin posted a meme on social media recently about failure that hit home in a good way–it was a take on that age-old adage about “try, try again”. The original saying is about how when you fail, you should just keep trying until you have success. But the iteration in this meme includes a novel concept–seeking to understand why you failed in the first place. And then maybe once you understand how and why you are failing, when you try again, you can correct whatever might be standing in the way of your success and you will achieve your goal.

Seek to understand. Music to my ears–I am always trying to understand. It drives my husband nuts, because that means I ask him a million questions trying to understand, often playing Devil’s Advocate. NOT his favorite game. But he is one of the only people that I actually do this with, and it’s because of my comfort level with him. I don’t need a therapist to tell me that. But I’m still seeing one to help faciliate this Journey of Understanding that my mid-life crisis has brought about.

I have always been The Quiet One. Every personality test I’ve ever taken leans heavily toward me being the peacemaker, the “why can’t we all just get along” White personality on the Color Wheel Personality Test, which is no shock. I loathe conflict, and will go to great lengths to avoid it.

GREAT. LENGTHS.

But with my husband, I seem to have no problem seeking out conflict in order to try and understand WTF he is talking about. This is definitely a topic for a different post on a different day. This was not the direction that today’s post was meant to head toward, but I tend to let myself get distracted by the paths of my thoughts and before you know it, I wind up on a completely different journey than the one i started out on.

Course correction…

They say to write what you know, which makes authors like Stephen King and Dean Kontz some of the most interesting and/or scary people on the planet. I’m pigeon-holing myself with those two authors but they are good examples, I think. I could also use Tolkien, George R.R. Martin, and Sarah J. Maas for their world-building prowess. Talk about power behind the pen! I get weak in the knees thinking about the energy that is poured into works like theirs.

About a year ago, I found BookTok on TikTok, and have been swept away into a whole new Reading Rainbow of a world that is almost too vivid to try and put into words.

If you know, you know.

i’ve always been an avid reader, and have fallen into reading slumps over the years, and last March found myself not only in a very extended slump, but also seeking a reading and/or writing community to possibly join for ideas, shared experiences, brainstorming, etc., and when I found BookTok, it was almost orgasmic. There isn’t really another way to put it that accurately describes the ecstasy-like hit that came about from the deep dive I took that first night I fell down the Rabbit Hole into BookTok. I almost didn’t go to bed…on a work night!

BookTok is endless. A bottomless pool of creatives and content-consumers who GET IT. Yes, there are the interlopers who live on every social media platform and try to aim their poisonous arrows wherever they can to seek and destroy, but with those who have imagination comes the ability to take that poisonous arrow and reframe it into a storyline that turns said interloper into a vilain that you are going to love to hate. Story ideas galore!

And there is the spark, the energy that I was seeking and that I needed to get back on the right frequency and to find that flow again. Andi lt’s GLORIOUS.

But I still don’t want to edit my book.

That requires work, and that’s no fun, now is it? However, an interesting phenomenon has occurred as I’ve been prolongedly procrastinating…my original book that is the first in a trilogy has morphed in my mind to become a whole world of books with spin-off characters from the original book. I have three or four other ideas for stories based on characters who show up peripherally in the original storyline.

Leave an idea for too long and it starts to beome something else–or at least it does in my mind, and Sins of The Sisters: Soul Persuasion has been gathering virtual dust for too many years.

And now i’ve put it out there in the universe–the working title of my first literary love. Sins of the SIsters. There are 3 books that I had in mind when I started this journey: Soul Persuasion, Tangled Web, and The Loom of Life.

Remember, working titles.

They’re not great, but they encapsulate the theme of each book that I had in mind at the time that the story was…becoming. I started off with the goal of having each book be focused on ech of the three female main characters, so they each get to tell their own story, and as the stories filled out, so did the possibilities of future books with characters from this first storyline.

And now we have a pack of female werewolves who live a human Stepford Wife-life to throw off the scent and who meet their lone male wolf once every so many years to breed at the lake during a late summer festival that is known only to Others; a coven of lake witches who leave the area every year when the weather turns cold–they lose their hair and it is caught in the trees as they fly off for warmer climes–humans call this moss, but it’s Witch Hair and it is sacred to Others. And I have an idea for a Valkyrie spinoff, as the whole SOS world is based in Norse mythology. And I’ve also created a side project that is not necessarily born of the characters from this world, but from the location, Priest Lake and more pointedly, Sundance Mountain.

Quite possibly the most important characters.

This “side project” is something that has been living in my head for decades…since I was a teenager and started to fantasize what it would be like to live the ultimate Ski Bum life, and as I built the SOS world, it became clear that I could pay homage to my beloved Priest Lake through my stories. If you’ve never been, you must go. It is a magical place, and in the words of silent screen actress Nell Shipman, “Did you ever come to a place and instantly recognize it as your Ultima Thule, the one spot in all God’s world where you belonged, where your roots could go deep into the soil which would forever nourish you; Where inspiration and spiritual blessing welled up from the earth to top the tallest tamarack, spread to the encasing bowl of sky, return on every waterway to feed you everlastingly? Such a spot, so it seemed to me, was Priest Lake, in Idaho.”

So now that I’ve fallen down a few rabbit holes and gotten lost in the maze that is the mind palace I currently exist in, I’m going to climb back in the saddle and start the ride. First order of business was what doing what I told my therapist I planned to do whan he asked what I was going to do this week to make myself happy. And i said “finish one of the five blogs I’ve started on WordPress and hit publish”.

Let’s do this!