The Back Burner

Every writer faces it: The Back Burner.  Sometimes life gets in the way, we realize that income and survival are more important that creativity, that passion is wasted on the young.  Our writing gets shifted to the back burner.  Eventually, we forget about it.  We tell people, “I love writing!” but the truth is, we haven’t hit the keys in months.  We say “I’ll be published one day,” but “one day” slips further and further away with every day we fail to write.

And our writing is forgotten.

My 26th birthday passed and I don’t have a finished manuscript like I promised myself.  Life got in the way, job hunting took precedence over hammering out my writing, being broke sucked the passion out of me.

I still love writing.  Or, rather, I love the idea of writing.  Truth is… I hate what I’ve been trying to put on paper.  I hate that I can’t do what I need to do to get my writing back to what it used to be.  I hate the back burner.  I hate adulthood.  I hate that the world doesn’t turn without back-breaking labor and copious sums of cash.

I hate that the spark is gone… but what I hate most is that I’ve finally recognized that the spark is gone.  I want to rekindle it.  I want to be a writer and make my worlds turn with words and phrases.  I want that pile of notebooks stacked neatly under my bed to be useful again.  I want carrying a pen in my purse to mean more than “Just in case I need to jot a quick shopping list.”  I want to be who I was three months ago.

And this is mostly just me whining.  I’ve done a hell of a lot of that on this blog in the last several months, but I’m not going to apologize for it.  No one has to read it, but I do have to get this out.  My blog is my very neglected outlet.

So, here’s to hoping the disenchantment passes.