Happy Leap Day, everyone! And happy end of February… I’ll be very glad to see March tomorrow. I’ve been doing a monthly retrospective this year, just for my own reflective purposes, and this month was not as much fun to write about as January. We’ve had a lot of illness, some disappointments, too much time indoors, and worrying about the state of the world. I’m hoping March brings fresh energy, time in nature, adventure and fun, free-flowing creativity and living in the moment. (A girl can dream.)

But I have enjoyed my February blogging streak, which once again reminded me how happy I am when I’m free-writing. It’s hard to come up with a post every day, but I also feel a lot less pressure to make every post perfect. When you only have thirty minutes, you grab the best idea you have, write what you can, and hope it’s good enough. I was very happy with the way Grandma’s Card Game turned out, and I got some lovely responses from readers. Other posts were less great, but that’s okay. They kept the wheels turning.

The evolution of my blog posts this week brought me into a better mental space. Grandma’s Card Game put me in the mindset of appreciating my family and savoring small moments of connection. To Care For Others, You Must First Care For Yourself reminded me not to ignore my own needs for too long. Irons in the Fire got me thinking about the next step in my writing life. We Are Book People connected me to my passions: family, reading, and history. And I capped off the week with Finding God in the Creative Process, which helped me think about the mysteries of my own spirituality and of creativity itself. All of these posts represented my current thinking while also redirecting my thoughts into a more positive vein.

I feel ready– much readier than I would have predicted a week ago– to move forward with my writing life in March. I have decided to put a temporary hold on my novel. I will wait either for inspiration for how to re-write it, or a sign that I should query it. If nothing comes, I’ll re-evaluate in a few weeks and see how I feel, because I have no intention of keeping the book in a drawer permanently. But something inside me is telling me to wait, just a little bit, to see what comes. I’m going to listen to that voice.

For the next few weeks, I’ll be focusing jointly on my creativity project and essay writing. I have a few new ideas for essays and will be drafting those, as well as polishing and submitting the ones I wrote in January. For the creativity project, my goal is to research, take notes, and write a short post on my learning every day of the month. (I won’t publish most of them, but might put a few on the blog if I feel they’re good enough.) I hope this will eventually become something bigger– a website, a podcast, articles, a book. For now, I’m preparing the field.

In many ways, 2020 is a mirror to 2016 for me (and not just politically). In early 2016, I was seeking an agent; by March I had one, and though that won’t happen this year, I’m hopeful that I might have a new agent by the end of the calendar year. In 2016 I was also feeling torn between fiction and nonfiction. I even started a website called The Creativity Perspective that I worked on all summer that year, eventually taking it down in the fall when I decided to re-focus on my fiction. It’s all coming back to me four years later: that same urge to write about creativity, that same push to write nonfiction. In 2016 I felt like I had to choose. In 2020 I’m much more willing to say, “Both!” I have more background, more training, and more confidence. And I care less about the result than I used to, which feels freeing.

You can’t predict the writing life. You can only keep creating in a way that satisfies you, and hope that something you write will make an impact.

And even if it doesn’t make an impact on other people, it always makes an impact on me… so I will write on, and on, and on.