Coming Back to Vocal

So I am sitting here thinking, "What do I do?"

I am a homeschooling mom of two. I have been unemployed for ten years now. My last job was as a journalist. I loved it!

Every day was a little bit of an adventure. I have been writing for so long and I was finally making a little money at it.

But I was a mom.

And I had a tiny little girl at home who needed me.

The hours were long and the staff was short. I was the assistant editor of a two man show. It was just me and the editor in the office most days.

The stress was phenomenal; especially since I decided to journey into the land of journalism on an election year.

Talk about trial by fire!

So, I had to choose, family or career.

It was an easy, but bittersweet choice. I wanted to write for a living, but I wasn't living.

I was running. Constantly running.

My kids were growing up, my daughter needed her mother, my son needed more one on one time in his education.

The newspaper was taking time from my family and I was only getting a little joy from writing.

Actually, looking back now, the newspaper was sucking the joy out of writing for me.

Family is so very important.

I am a self proclaimed mob boss after all. And isn't the most important thing to a mob the family?

So home I have been since 2013. I took my son out of school and began to homeschool both him and his little sister. We tried cyber schools and public school online, but common core drove me to seek out my old text books for math and Language arts classes and teach history from literature and world history books.

The ride has been wild. I found an amazing school co operative group and even became a teacher of survival classes there for a couple of years.

But the dreaded Covid killed the group.

Like not literally, but the group no longer meets and we dispersed to other groups as the world came out of hiding. My skills at writing again went dormant and now I have spent the last year or so staring at my hands and lamenting their uselessness.

Yes, these hands raise chickens (I have about 3 dozen), these hands write up lesson plans for the kiddos, these hands make jelly and sometimes tik toks. These hands have changed diapers and wiped snot bubbles. They are important hands with important work to do!

But I want these hands to write!

I want them to create worlds again. To bring characters to life. To make stories sing out to readers.

And maybe make a little cashola off it.

Writing takes a really long time, especially when you are working on a series of seven fantasy novels and a series of three historical inspired romance novels. But there's always those times in a writers life when they just need a quick writing fix.

So here I am staring at Vocal again. At the 15 cents I have earned over the six years of ignoring its potential to at least be a place to vent. If people follow me, hooray!

If not, Oh well.

At least I can get some words out of my soul and onto paper and maybe some of you will enjoy it. Maybe some of you will laugh at it and think I am the most terrible writer in the world.

Either way you can't tell how things are going to go, unless you go there.