For what you might ask? Well for being a week late with a blog post, that’s what.

Last week my wife delivered our third child a couple of weeks earlier than we expected and well… needless to say, it’s stirred things up a bit. I scrambled about quite a bit trying to figure out getting work off, watching our other two kids and needless to say, things like writing a blog post kind of fell by the wayside.

But, I’m back on track now and working to catch up as quickly as possible.

Having kids is an incredibly surreal experience, though not one that I’ve found stressful in and of itself. The stress I’ve experienced comes far more from realizing that it’s up to me to provide for them and needing to find a way to do that. In college, I knew couldn’t pick a single career I knew I wanted to do for the rest of my life, which is why I majored in English. Some of you may roll your eyes at that, but an English major is actually an extremely flexible and useful degree for many positions because of its focus on critical analysis and written communication. Unfortunately, that flexibility doesn’t give me any real direction to figure out what I should be doing.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to write for a living. In fact, the more I work on my own writing and help others through critiquing, the more I realize it’s something I’d like to do. But making money through writing isn’t easy, and there are no guarantees. And unfortunately, a guarantee is something I need with a family.

So where does that leave me? Lost, confused and somewhat irritated. There is a path for me somewhere, but I sure haven’t found it yet. All there is to do is to press on.

What a melancholy blog post this turned out to be. I wouldn’t post it if the whole purpose of this was to record my thoughts as an aspiring author, and these thoughts and feelings certainly aren’t unique to me. Maybe someday they’ll benefit someone else.

As far as Penumbra goes, I’m still working hard on my big polish edit. From here I’m going to do a read aloud, and at that point, I’m pretty much going to be ready to send it out to agents. I’m getting sick of the manuscript by this point, believe you me! I’m ready to move on to the next thing, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to leave this half baked. It’s going to be as perfect as I can make it (within reason) before I move on. I’ve got two nice weeks of paternity leave coming up and hopefully I can put some of that to good use!