Oops, I did it again. (Why yes, I am in my late 30s, how did you guess?) In a supreme twist of accidental fortune-telling, my last blog post was about how hard it is to find time to work on my creative writing. And for all my good intentions, spelled out in said post, I proceeded to fall off the wagon into a ditch somewhere and I just sort of stayed there until now. I even had a piece published in June (a poem of all things, which I’ll be talking about in my next blog post because that was somewhat accidental, too) and I was so overloaded with the rest of my life that I didn’t even bother to tell anyone outside of my immediate family about it.

Why do we do this to ourselves, writers?

It’s not like I don’t want to build my creative writing presence. It’s not like I don’t want to be published and further my career. It’s just…well, it’s a choice, isn’t it? How many choices do we make in a single day? Tens? Dozens? Tiny choices, like what color shirt to wear or what to have for lunch, and bigger choices, like what to prioritize at work or which appointments to make, and even bigger choices, like whether to accept that new job offer or sign up for that class.

It’s a lot.

You can’t choose everything every day. I can’t choose everything every day.

But I do need to, at least semi-regularly, choose the writing I do for myself. Otherwise, that’s all it will ever be.

So, I’m back, ready to roll and hoping to recommit just ahead of NaNoWriMo 2021. Rather than start something new, I may use the month to edit the novel I wrote last year (you know, the one I’m “working on” according to my bio) so I can finally get it to a couple beta readers for a first pass under someone else’s eyes. I also have a children’s picture book manuscript that I believe is ready content-wise, but I don’t know much about the children’s publishing world so I have some research to do. Those two tasks are significant in and of themselves, and should keep me quite busy. I’d also like to submit to a few more literary magazines before the end of the year, and of course get back to a regular posting schedule with this site and my Instagram (@paige.l.austin, come hold me accountable!), which I thoroughly enjoy but which went just as dark as this site did when I fell into the proverbial ditch.

Choices, choices everywhere, and not an hour to spare. Let’s see how I do.