I’ve been looking over my most recent blog posts and have noticed a trend – there’s a lot of filler there, but not a lot of writing about my journey toward getting a novel published. Wasn’t that my original point?? In case you missed it…um, yeah.

The sad truth of the matter is that I’ve had little to no time to work on my novel recently. I have definitely decided not to substitute teach next year, but I kind of feel like I should stick out the rest of this year. It’s time consuming, but I’m trying.

The rest of my time goes to my part-time writing gigs. I really like those 🙂 I’m learning all kinds of fun stuff – I’m up-to-date on village and township zoning (I didn’t even know what that was two years ago), I’ve learned about art therapy, midwifery, early education programs, and ballroom dancing. My network has also expanded exponentially – if you need something in the Traverse City area, it’s a good bet that I know someone who could help you out.

While I don’t get paid a lot for my gigs, I really enjoy them…and that’s gotten me thinking:

What kind of writing do I want to do?

My novel is my dream, but it has had to take back seat to everything (who am I kidding…it’s so far back, it’s at the end of a conversion van). I’m not a journalist (I don’t care about digging for the truth…I prefer my ‘fluff’ pieces, where I get to interview people and share their stories). So where does that leave me?

I’m not sure, but it will start this summer with a schedule. I’ve never lived by one (always blaming it on the ever changing events in my life), but it’s time. I don’t know how it will look yet, but I know what I need to do to figure out where I’m going to take my writing. I NEED to fit three things in to every week:

1) Time for my current gigs
2) Time to find and query new gigs
3) Time for my novel

I’ve always packed my summer days full of other stuff, thinking “I need to get this done before school starts!”, but now that I won’t have that pressure, I can do this. I want to do this. I NEED to do this, because I AM a writer. I’ve finally realized that it doesn’t matter what I’m writing, I just love writing it!

So it’s time to explore all of my options, figure out where I want to go, and then plot a course to get there. If I think about it too much it’s a little overwhelming, but that’s okay, because when I think about the stories, and the bylines, and the writing…it makes me happy.