Rebooting...

I am awesome at making excuses about my writing.  For example, here's a great one: I haven't written lately because I've been too busy thinking about writing.  Lame?  Maybe.  But true.  At least, mostly true.

This past month has brought a lot my way.  There was the Chick-Fil-A rally/scandal/protest (depending on your viewpoint), some disappointment (my husband did not get the job he's been holding out for), and adventure (we took 7 members of our youth group to summer camp).

And a lot of thinking.

There are about half a dozen blog posts rolling around in my head that I just haven't sat down to write yet.  Every time I think of working on them, I get caught up pinning, or tweeting, or instagramming (is that a word?), or watching My Little Pony on Netflix (yes, really), or, to my chagrin, eating (I love to eat).

This is why we take the kids' cell phones away from them at the beginning of each youth group meeting.  Because we as humans, and particularly our generation and theirs, are far too prone to distraction.

For example, since starting this blog, I have gotten up from the computer four times: for snacks (at least one was vitamin-fortified cereal), to play with my cats, to keep my cats from assaulting each other (all in play, of course) and to check the laundry.  Not to mention, I've checked facebook and Pinterest, too.

As with weight loss, I find myself having a hard time disciplining myself.  There are so many "shinies" that are tempting me away from my ultimate goal.  I know I want to be a writer.  I've wanted to since I was probably about eleven years old.  Every choice I made in school, every elective, everything was to further my goals are a writer and performer.  Even now, I blog not so that my incredible and impassioned ideas make their way into mainstream thinking (please: note the self-deprecating sarcasm), but so that I would have another outlet in which I could express myself and entertain others the best way I know how.

And yet.  Even as I scroll through Pinterest and smugly mutter to myself, "I could have made that", I hear a tiny voice whisper back, "Yes, but they have and you haven't."  I skim through the books available on my Kindle and, after reading some with their grammatical errors and flimsy plots (and please don't get me started on the eight thousand vampire series out there now), I say aloud, "That is what people are reading?!"  Yet I have not given those people any other options.

Ross has encouraged me.  The comments, made both by friends and strangers, on my blog and facebook, encourage me.  My family has encouraged me.  God himself has encouraged me in ways that only I understand.

But where the rubber meets the road, I find that I'm likely to veer off the highway and into a comfortable embankment of all-too-available technology.  A pretty elaborate metaphor, but most of you understand completely. 

So it's time for me to really, really start writing again.  Not just blogging, but sitting down, doing research, and working on my novel.  I've been told that a plus-size superhero isn't that great an idea. 

I've also been told that I was foolish to wait for the man of my dreams, because he didn't exist.

After two and a half years of marriage, we can see how super that advice was.

I don't want to reveal too much here, but it's a dream that is too big for me to handle alone.  I love what my pastor says: "If that dream you keep having is too big for you ever to achieve on your own, then it's from God and you will need his help!"  A young adult novel with a plus-size heroine and an underlying Christian theme?  Yeah...that's media poison. 

So it's got to be God's way.

I get down on myself for lack of discipline, both with eating and with writing.  But then, I think...discipline isn't about getting up at 5 AM to go jogging, or resisting every single sweet that comes my way.  It's not about giving up every ounce of free time to work on my writing.  It's more about obedience than willpower or personal strength.  It's about doing what you're supposed to do, even when you don't feel like it, because you know it's the right thing and it's good for you - and others.

Which is why I am ending this post right now, ignoring my cats, silencing my phone...and working on the book that I will someday publish.  God's way.