Back to Writing, My Home, My Heart, and My Mess

In the last week, my writing has been erratic, my habits have been lost, and I've been caught up in all the excitement mentioned in the last two previous posts.

Vacation, Dance Convention, and a family member's injury and illness.

Some of that time I wrote. Some of it I rested. Then facebooked (is that a verb?), and prayed, and danced.

Now I'm back home, back to my writing, and I am thankful for all my usual routines, and even some of my usual mess. I don't think I write well without a least a little clutter. However, too much clutter can be bad. It has to be just the right amount.

Don't ask me how I measure that, because I really don't know. I know that the tabletop around me can't be perfectly clear. There has to be a Bible, a cup of tea - half empty, a book about writing, and a few stray items from family members, and then I'm happy and I can focus. Leaning piles of paper that are above an inch tall, and dirty dishes are too much mess. A few pieces of artwork and a vase of flowers are a nice touch, but not every piece of artwork that my kids have created in the last week.

I generally write at the dining room table, and sometimes in my bedroom. My favorite chair puts me to sleep, so it's not my favorite writing chair. The "computer" office room is too loud, and too much of my husband's creative place. He works days as a Supervising Electrical Engineer, and spends parts of his evenings and weekends as a video editor. He likes to take apart old computers and put them back together with extra hard drives.

The first year we were married, I would come home from substitue teaching and find the hard drive with my writing on it disconnected and placed to the side of one of our computers. I learned more about the hardware of computers than I ever wanted to know, and I still try to forget the horror of finding my "baby" (my writing) left forlorn on the side of the desk in a hard drive I didn't know how to reconnect the first time.

There is a reason that I am protective of "MY" laptop and don't want my wonderful husband even touching it. I'm afraid he'll change something, or take it apart to make it better, and I won't be able to recover my writing. I try to keep hard copies, as well as back ups. Usually my husband can recover just about anything off of an old hard drive, but sometimes my writing is not his priority, and he has asked me in the past, "Do you really need all these file?" Yes, dear.

Don't get me wrong here. I love my husband madly, deeply and passionately. We share everything we can together, and someday even hope to do some creative movie making of our own. Our church currently has a Creative Team that makes video dramas for worship, and my husband is one of the technical directors. So, maybe someday, when he's retired from "real" work, and I've learned out to write a script . . . we will actually put our creative passions together. That's just one of our dreams for the future that we know we're not quite ready for yet.

I haven't even let him help me with my blog to make it better . . . because I have this crazy idea about learning how to do it myself, with just some helpful hints from him.

So, I'm happy to be home, where my heart is, with my husband, daughters, dogs, cat all close around me, and my parents just next door, and my in-laws all just a phone call or a semi-short drive away. Writing here is easier, even in the midst of distractions.