What Have I Been Doing with My Life?

Usually when I’ve taken a long extended hiatus from my blog, I usually tell my readers that instead of writing about life, I’ve been living it. To some extent this is true and false this time around. While I have been having some spectacular adventures, I did at least attempt to catalog them, like my last entry way back in September.

Looking at the timeframe, you would think that I had stopped writing altogether. After all, I didn’t even put in my annual yearly reflections post (although I’m sure I started writing one).

But no, quite the opposite is true, gentle readers. In fact, I have been writing assiduously since my last post. It’s just that none of it has gone toward my blogging or even my book (more about that later). Occasionally, I look for paying gigs to submit my work to, just so I can feel validated as a writer. And up until September, I’d gotten rejected or turned down for various reasons.

But sometime around late September/early October, I saw an ad in my favorite writing e-zine, Angela Hoy’s Writer’s Weekly. And on a typical whim, I went to the site, drawn by an easy first-round application of taking a grammar test (I’m still actually smarting that I got 2 wrong and not a perfect score). But I did ace the test and made it to the second round of the application, which required writing on a topic of the company’s choice. I passed this round as well. Somehow, I made it to new writer for BKA Content and was actually getting paid to write! Woohoo! Goal in life accomplished! I can scratch this off my bucket list. No, I’m not Anatole Broyard or Ta’Nehisi Coates, but someone is reading my writing (even if they don’t even know it’s me—the official term is ghostwriting).

For those of you who don’t know me yet, this is just another of the hats I keep juggling on my head. I currently work full-time at a college library; I am also a part-time adjunct English professor at that same college; have a husband and an active 5-year-old boy (mostly by his choice, but the soccer and swimming that I haul him to are by mine); serve as caretaker to my father, who is currently on dialysis and in a nursing home; and I sometimes still try to eek out a social life with other family and friends. So I lead an extraordinarily busy lifestyle and have now crammed 48-hour deadlines into that mix.

No, I still haven’t finished my first novel yet. But I’m part of a community of writers. So since I’ve been sharing the fact that I have a blog, I think it’s darn well time I start updating it.