It has been nearly a year since I have posted anything to this blog. With everything that’s happened over the past eighteen months or so and trying to adjust to it has left little room for creative thought. Returning to this blog is not an acknowledgement that things are better now, though in some ways they are, but it’s more of my way of showing that no matter how tough things get, I’ll never stop being a writer.

I think we all need to accept that sometimes we have to take a step back from the things we love to do, our passions and hobbies and even possible future careers, to focus on the here and now. For the entirety of 2021, I have been leading the English department at my school during the most challenging time our schools have faced in recent history. That, among many other things, had become my priority over writing.

The unfortunate part to all this was that I felt even worse during this time because I wasn’t writing, feeling like I was falling behind in my career. I had once been so active in my writing career that I was spending several hours a day on my writing, was publishing short stories and non-fiction pieces, had a YouTube channel with a good deal of subscribers, had followers on Instagram and Facebook, and attend writers conferences and workshops fairly regularly. All of that died away at the beginning of 2020, and now I am only left with the remnants of my once growing and prosperous writing career.

It all really is quite depressing when looking at it from this lens.

However, like I said, I understand that I made decisions, took on other priorities, which caused me to put my writing aside. Even though I have barely written 50 pages this year, I have done a lot of really great work with my school and have helped to keep the spark of writing (and reading) alive in my students during this difficult time. Because of this, I do not feel like I was wrong in neglecting my writing. Still… it is time for me to get back to it.

So here I am! At 6:30 in the morning with a cup of coffee and my cats and dog secluded to the other part of the house so they cannot bring their chaos into my office to distract me. My goal is to write a blog post at the end of each week from here on out in addition to organizing all the various writings for my novels, working on my short story ideas, and writing some non-fiction pieces here and there. Eventually, I will get my Instagram, Facebook page, and YouTube channel back off the ground, but those are things that I will just let grow with time.

I am excited to be back at my writing, and I hope that, despite whatever the universe decides to throw at me next, I am back at it for good.