Writing again

In my spare time (ha ha, right?), I am attempting to write a book. I started it years ago, before I was pg with my first son. Back when I started, I had all these grandiose ideas of how it would go down. I'd get so caught up in writing, I'd be up late at night and struggle through the workday the following day. I even started trying to convince my husband that if we weren't pregnant by the end of the year (this was early 2004), then I would either take a leave of absence or quit my job so I could write full time for a while.

Then I got pregnant and my writing came to a grinding halt. My fiction writing, that is. For a while I had started to fear I wasn't actually getting anywhere, writing scenes that excited my imagination, but not much to link them together. Parts of it flowed well, but I had so many ideas and so many things I wanted to have happen, and much of it came to be with thoughts of "wouldn't it be cool if..." and I'd write the chapter. And then my pregnancy seemed to suck me dry of any creative energy I had. I'd sit at my computer and get nowhere. It was like I'd run out of gas.

At first, I didn't worry too much about it because I figured after I had the baby, I'd get my brain back and start up again. That was well over five years ago and save for the last several weeks, I quite literally hadn't even opened most of my files.

Something woke up in me recently, and I find it a little ironic that I happen to be pregnant again. I blamed my lack of focus and creativity on my first pregnancy, then later on my lack of time. But somehow I'm back to thinking about this story, daydreaming about the characters, and finding little bits of time to squeeze in writing. I'm not sure what has changed, but I'm happy about it. I'd made such a big deal about my grand ambitions to be a novelist, I've spent the last five years feeling a little bit like a failure. Not that I didn't think I could, and would, pick it up again. But I'd been feeling like "someday" was taking a lot longer to reach than I'd originally thought.

And with that, I'm going to go park myself on the couch and instead of mindlessly flipping channels, I'm going to do some writing. That, and covet a new, lightweight laptop...