I've been absent from writing for awhile now. I lost my dad. I'd been caring for him for 5 months before he passed on Mother's Day. It's been hard. But I've missed writing, and the therapy it provides. So I've started back up. I'm reading a great craft book called Story Genius by Lisa Cron. 

I love the break down of why and how. The exercises that force me to really look at my character and my writing.

A sudden realization hit me like a storm of rocks. While taking about the background of a novel's MC, the author talks about why this character is who he/she is and why. How we need to know their past intimately in order to know what drives them. So...I've been doing the exercises and while I thought I knew my character really well, I have more to learn. And part of that learning is finding out why this story is important to me and what I discovered was deeper than I'd thought. Hence the storm of rocks smacking me in the heart.

I thought I was writing this story because I have an adopted child, and showing that birth families aren't always the family's that people grow up in is part of our story. And I want to show that these other families are just as loving as birth families. But wham...I think what I'm really trying to do with this story is validate myself as a non-birth mother. Whoa! I just haven't figured out who I'm trying to validate this to. The world? Myself? I don't know. I'll have to get back to that later. Or just maybe, I'll figure it out along the way as I revise this story that means the world to me.

Back to work. Have a great day!