Hello, Good-Bye.

It's with a disappointed heart that I share the following: this blog is going on hiatus until further notice.

I've been writing.  I have.  It's not that I have neglected my art.  Most of what I have been writing has wound up in the mouths of my teenage actors.  I've been writing new plays for them every 6 to 8 weeks or so, and I also feel that the time has come for me to resurrect some of my older skits and plays and give them new life.

In addition, I feel that God is calling me to do a new thing in my life, something that will require me to stretch my faith, embrace my gifts, and trust him in an area of my life that I've always considered a hobby, rather than a professions.  I am not ready to share this new goal just yet, but it will - God willing - involve me reaching out to others like myself to cultivate the link between the dramatic arts and the church.

I want to thank those of you who have read, commented, encouraged and supported me from my first social media posts (yep - myspace) until now.  You have helped carry me through times when I doubted my talent, doubted that I had anything worthwhile to say.  After many years, I believe I am finding my voice, and I know what I want to share.

I still have novels and skits and poems in my head that may never come out, but it's time I sat down at the computer and let them have a real fighting chance to do just that.  

I'm not ready to seal up this chapter of my life just yet, so I'm keeping my "good-bye" open-ended.  It's entirely possible that my path will bring me back here with a lot more to say.  But, for now, I need to step back and give my increasingly limited free time to the words that have been locked in my head for too long.

May God's love sustain you, may you never run out of coffee, and may every cat you encounter remind you of me.

Signing off for now,
Rebecca L. Godlove

Hour By Hour

Although my little peanut is approaching the nine month mark, some things are dawning on me just now.  As in, routine usually works really well for the baby's health and happiness...so why haven't I applied a regular schedule to my daily life, too?!

I'm one of those probably not-so-rare people who needs boundaries and deadlines in order to make things happen, because I'm exactly 0% self-motivated when it comes to most things.  However, for that very reason, I find myself unwilling to actually set those boundaries for myself.  It's a vicious cycle of laziness and anxiety.  But it's time to break it.

As things are, we've developed regular days and times for baby's bath, for example.  (He's doesn't get so insanely dirty yet that daily scrub-downs are necessary, and he might - like his daddy - be prone to dry skin, so why push the envelope?)  Regular feeding times are crucial for a baby, especially a formula-fed one, so I've become pretty adept at working my own life around bottles and naps.  Still, things fall apart.  Laundry piles up.  Plans come undone.  Photo and writing projects linger in purgatory, wondering silently to themselves if they will ever be complete.  Even this blog languishes, perking up like an old lap dog for its once or twice a month visit and petting session.

So, I think it's finally time.  It's time to spend a few extra dollars and go pick up one of those giant "mom" calendars.  You know what I mean - those ones with daily slots as big as an iPhone for you to write everything in.  Dinner plans, doctors' appointments, social events (ha, ha, ha - what are those again?), chores, etc.  

Part of the reason for this is, well, housekeeping and homemaking is kind of my full-time gig right now.  I'll probably end up having to work part-time once the baby is a little older, unless things change for us financially, but right now, why not do the best I can to make my house a happier place?  More welcoming for my husband, who works hard at a job he generally dislikes.  More pleasant for myself and my baby, who - at least until spring - spend the majority of our time here.  More organized, less stressful, more inviting, less cluttered.

I've always been that awful creative stereotype.  The one with clever and fun ideas, the one with half a dozen projects started and three or four more tumbling around in my head at any given time.  The one who finally gets that electric storm of inspiration and sits down to write/work/create for hours while the dirty dishes pile up and the curtains collect cat hair. (I mean, even more than usual.)  I'm finding now, after years of these fits of productivity mixed with months of sloth, that, well, it's not a great approach.

Slow and steady is supposed to win the race, right?  You don't lose weight from a single day of clean-eating after weeks of Egg McMuffins, nor does a novel come from an hour of frenzied, divinely-inspired genius followed by distracted musing.  So, what I have to do is create a schedule for myself.  An honest-to-goodness, real-life daily schedule with time for cooking, exercising, leisure, housekeeping, prayer, reading, and writing.  

Oh my gosh, just seeing that in black and white is terrifying.  How do I fit that all in a day?  Even without a baby, that would seem impossible.

I guess I'm going to have to start very, very small.  Like planning out the week's dinners.  And deciding which two weekdays I want to use as laundry days.  

Hey - writing this blog is a start, right?  Check one thing off my daily list.  Now, let's see...can I make two more posts this week?

...and still make sure the cats get fed?