Tearing Things Down

Wow, so it’s been a while since I’ve blogged here. Sorry about that! Life kind of got in the way. In the last four or so months, I’ve sold two condos, bought a house, moved, continued on with wedding plans (a little over a month to go), attended the funeral of my 94 year old grandfather (as hard as death is I have comfort in knowing he lived a long and very full life.), and changed jobs. To say I’ve been a bit busy is an extreme understatement. There’s been good, bad and ugly over the last few months, but I look forward to all the good coming in the remainder of the year.

Sadly, the only thing I haven’t been doing a lot of is writing, which is evident in the cobwebs growing around this blog. It’s been a rough road and my schedule and stress level have made writing downright painful over the last six months or so. But in taking a new job as a teardown and cost engineer, I’ve learned some things about my writing. In my new role at work, we take aircraft parts and pull them apart to their base components. We study each piece, try to uncover all the processes that were involved in making it, and then try to understand how it is connected to the other pieces in order to create a much larger functioning part.

And in doing a few of these teardowns, I’ve realized I should really be doing the same with my writing. Take it apart to the bare bones, understand my characters, their motivations, what makes them tick, and how their stories and actions work together to create a much larger cohesive story. There’s a lot of moving parts to a manuscript and until you understand each of them, you can’t fully connect with your writing, your plot, your setting, or your characters.

So my next step is to spend some time really digging into my current WIP; getting to know all the elements so I can build an even better overall story. In doing so, I hope that I can dive head first into my current and future projects with a renewed sense of excite. I’ve got a lot of excitement headed my way and I hope to carry that into my writing in the future.

Thanks to all who have stuck with me through the rollercoaster over these last few months. I hope to share some quite a bit of happiness throughout the rest of the year. Keep doing your thing and I’ll be right there with you.