“Coming Soon”

I took to heart all the advice of favorite authors and journalists and ditched the “New Year’s resolutions”, at least the terminology anyway. Instead, I chose goals and life changes for the upcoming year. Many of my life changes are, I’m sure, like so many of yours—be grateful, slow down and smell the roses, try to be a better human, better mom, better wife, better, better, better.

First up for 2017 was a new website. Since web design is not one of my talents, I enlisted the help of an amazing designer. While she did all the heavy lifting, she needed answers in order to provide the writing platform of my dreams.

I received a questionnaire that asked pointed questions about what I liked, didn’t like, and what I wanted to change about my current website, all of which brought me unpleasantly face-to-face with what I had not achieved in 2016 with my writing. More specifically, I was forced to face the fact that I had not finished my book. To be totally honest and since I am on a total creativity “cleanse”, I must confess I haven’t touched it since the first ten thousand words I wrote six months ago.

When I mentioned to my designer that finishing my book was one of my 2017 goals, she gave me a page I could use in the future entitled “Coming Soon”.

Seeing it in my administrator’s dashboard evoked a sudden need to breathe into a paper bag, and it was all my own fault.

Using life, work, a home remodel, vacation, and children as an excuse for not writing is a bad, I mean, REALLY BAD idea. Once we resort to excuses, damage is done. Excuses slow writers down, weaken them. Excuses are kryptonite, dementors that suck the life out of us, leaving us broken and gasping for air.

“Coming Soon” may loom like eight-foot-high letters on an old-fashioned movie marquee, but in a future that now seems far, far away, not finishing the book will become just be another part of the tangled, ugly mess of life’s what ifs, why nots, and things left undone that are too painful to let go of.

Photo Credit: R.S. Atwell