Great expectations

It’s been awhile since I updated, but well worth the wait I’m sure since now I actually have something meaningful to write. After four months hanging in a consignment shop in a village in Virginia, one of my photographs finally sold. So, yes, I’m very proud to say I am now an artist worth something. The irony of the occasion is that it came shortly after I had decided to hang up my digital camera, so to speak, until next summer and focus instead on my writing. I have not been able to accomplish anything literary or fictional lately with all the stress of also needing to make deadlines for county fairs or craft shows. It’s enough just thinking about the deadlines for writing contests and NaNoWriMo and writing club meetings … and Christmas (the stories I plan to write and give as gifts, because I'm crafty ... and cheap), not to mention that I hope to begin freelancing in earnest one of these days.

Though I write for a living, I currently write full time for a newspaper, which is great and challenging and even spontaneous … but it’s just so gosh darn factual. I crave retreating into the fictional world inside my mind, where it can be winter at the snap of my fingers, or where I can rewrite past real life stories to make them play out the way I would have liked. Of course freelancing likely will not supply the freedom of which I am speaking, but that’s okay. It will balance out the fantasy; only I’ll be able to write from home and move on to something else whenever my work is done. By that point in my life I will also be able to reincorporate my photography into my work schedule.

So, that’s the plan … for now. In the mean time I just eat, breathe, and sleep the written word, whether I am reading the work of others or constructing my own tales on the page in front of me, and for now that must be enough.