Blogging is hard sometimes, as is any sort of writing. When my foster son died of SIDS, now nearly twenty years ago, I found it impossible to write for nearly three years. I occupied myself by throwing myself into other work–like cataloging all the books in the library at Quartz Hill School of Theology; that and teaching classes in theology, Bible, and Hebrew. Now, after being thrown into becoming the interim pastor of my church (now moving into my fifteenth month) I’ve been increasingly consumed with doing that and other writing than preparing a sermon for each Sunday has fallen by the wayside to a large extent. My youngest daughter, who suffers from a serious mental illness (she’s bipolar), is thankfully in recovery and stable (and med compliant) so she requires much less attention now than she did for the six years from initial diagnosis until she was finally stabilized, now about two years ago. Nevertheless, my head really has not been in my writing for awhile, whether it is books or doing blogs here or at the Jerusalem Post. I’m lucky now if I get a post up even once a month, which is terrible, I know. I have two science fiction novels and one historical fiction novel that I am in the middle of trying to rewrite, another novel that I’m trying to peddle, and three novels that I’m somewhere in the first drafts of. Plus, I’ve got three non-fiction books that I’m trying to rewrite. But it’s been now nearly five years (shortly after my youngest daughter’s initial diagnosis with her mental illness, when she was becoming increasingly uncontrollable and violent–I still suffer from some PTSD from that)–five years it’s been since my last book contract. I’ve got several indie-published novels that I’ve put up at Amazon since then, thanks to encouragement from Sarah A. Hoyt, and I’m making a bit of income from them, which is nice and much better than I’d make off them if they were just sitting on my hard drive. But my writing has really fallen off from what it used to be with how life has gotten in the way, as it were.

Sometimes life is like that. But you need to not let it discourage you. Just keep plugging along. The droughts don’t last forever. The rains will come.

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