Home is the sailor, home from the sea........

It's funny how life unfolds--sometimes in overdrive, pedal pushed to the floor mats, then in a breath, the pause button is punched and the picture freezes, a few pixels missing here and there....

I opened a new blog entry tonight for the first time since July of 2009. I knew it had been ages since I last rambled on for the benefit of the brave (and misguided) few who choose to grace this page, but I was absolutely astonished that fifteen months had elapsed since I had made an entry. The themes that dominated the posts of 2009 were primarily musical, an exciting array of coffee-house gigs with my guitarist accomplice Bobby, reiterating the Beatles' catalog and throwing in the occasional Irish singer/songwriter piece or original. Those were heady times, to be sure, as I ventured back into public performance for the first time in years. Bobby and I continued to write, record, and perform, and it looked as if music was going to be the main focus for the rest of 2009.....

I don't know what happened to derail that, really......Bobby and I continued to play together at church, and still managed to slip the odd coffee house appearance in here and there. But the year grew old and the days grew short, and soon it was 2010 and snow was dropping for what seemed like months. The very cold and white winter slid into the scorching, bone-dry Sahara of summer, and I found myself changing jobs and summarily losing all sense of artistic focus. Bobby and I played out a few more times, sporadically at best, and weeks went by without me even touching the guitar......

And now it's the end of October, and the breezes that blow down from South Mountain to dislodge the vermilion leaves are stirring my artistic sensibility as well. But, as of late, I've actually found myself returning to my first love--writing. I had started writing short stories when I was about 8....pathetic tales of pirates and the like, and, by the time I was 14, I had lapsed into underdeveloped science fiction, heavily emulating the style of Ray Bradbury. Then I picked up a guitar and pretty much walked away from writing for the next 30 years.....

2003 was the strangest year of my life, and the fall found me starting to write a full length novel--a long, full length novel--that stayed stubbornly unfinished for about three years. With the gentle, inspiring prodding of my wife, Alison, I picked it back up in '07, brought it to a conclusion, and finally rewrote the ending just a few short months ago. Then, through an amazing set of circumstances only God could have engineered, I suddenly found myself in communication with an editor at a publishing company in Tennessee, and now my manuscript is in mid-editing, judicious trimming to bring it to a readable length, with imminent publication likely by the end of the year.........

And so, the pause button is released again. Thirty years after I sat in my parents' basement and pounded away on an ancient Smith-Corona elite typewriter, scratching an eraser across the onion paper and brushing the failings of my mis-keyings away, I now find myself back at the same PC from whence I started this blog on a freezing January night almost two years ago. Then, my creative project was an album of praise music, still unfinished on my dust-shrouded digital recorder. I'll probably pull it out again in the not-too-distant future and try to remember how I wanted to finish the skeletal frameworks of the songs which sit, patient and idling, waiting for the day my brain inevitably swings back to that artistic discipline.....

But for now, I'm back to a more distant creative origin. Words flow non-stop in my brain awake or asleep. Every now and then, I can string them together in a coherent enough fashion to make something of at least mild interest to others. With my novel soon to see the light of day, I hope my sphere of influence is ever widening. Part of me still feels like I did at eight, composing tales for my own amusement. I've hopefully stepped into a completely new season. Either way, it feels great to be home.......