On Friday blog posts I am supposed to be writing fiction, or writing about fiction.  Unfortunately, other than sporadic entries in my journal and Facebook status updates, I haven’t been writing much of anything. Life has rather flipped upside down.

We decided to put our home of over 17 years on the market, and listed it June 7. We were shocked to find we had a contract in less than 48 hours, and the buyers wanted all the inspections, repairs, and possession within 30 days. Obviously writing was not a priority, other than making to-do lists. We were unable to find an available apartment within the time we needed it, so we moved our stuff into storage and ourselves in with a family from church. We are also house/pet-sitting for another friend, I suffered extreme tendinitis in my writing wrist, attended a family funeral, and witnessed the death of our family car. Currently my husband is focused on his last year of graduate school, an internship, and his day-job, in addition to finding a new car. Our last year of homeschooling begins in two weeks for our youngest, and our new apartment will be ready to move in on September 12.

So, what’s a writer to do? This writer is realizing that this is part of “Unleashing the Next Chapter,” and all I can do is the best I can do. I haven’t looked at my manuscript in almost three months, but my characters are alive and well inside my head. I have often read that a real writer is always writing, even when no words are being written on paper. Everything I have done, every person I have met, and every setting I have seen is being added to my imagination and has the potential to become part of my novel.

Even though I haven’t been writing, I have been reading. I have read a book that I really disliked and took the time to analyze why I didn’t like it. I have done a lot of research online. I read a book I loved, and analyzed why. I have read a number of magazines about the craft and business of writing. I am staying as involved as I possibly can in my local writers’ guild. And, I am dreaming of my new “creative corner” that I will get to create in my new apartment.

Until I moved, I didn’t realize how programmed I was to write at my desk, surrounded by books, listening to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, and swiveling in a well-worn office chair. My husband and I bought this large secretary desk shortly after moving into our home, and it was where I managed home and business, worked through graduate school, made lesson plans and graded student papers, compiled our family scrapbooks, and wrote everything from get-well cards to journal entries to blog posts to Bible studies to magazine articles to flash fiction to my current novel draft. Now my desk and computer are in storage in another city, and it’s drawers and contents are in a friend’s garage in another town. I feel displaced and disorganized.

But here I sit in yet another friend’s family room, typing on my husband’s laptop, realizing that as Descartes said “I think, therefore I am,” — I write, therefore I am a writer.