For a while there, I was my own best friend.  Maybe I still am.

My parents split long before my memories could confirm it had ever been any other way. The two sisters I had were four and ten years older; by default I was either too little or too big of a pain to tag along. Surrounded by cornfields and gravel roads, my nearest friends lived over half-an-hour away. I visited them on holidays or saw them at church--playdates were rare, too much stress for my single Mom. Two boys lived next door. They treated me like blood brothers would, rescuing me from one peril (climbing too high up the tree fort tree) and delivering me gleefully into another (swooping bats from the mammoth pine tree in their front yard). And growing up at the tail end of the twentieth century left me with no social network to complain to about it all.

What did I do with all of my free time? I did what any desperate kid would have done in my situation: I used my imagination. Hour upon hour was whiled away in my basement serving never-ending droves of invisible diners who would hover around child-sized card tables at the renowned "Cactus Bay Restaurant". In the creepy-crawly recesses of the back storage closet, I would whip up light-as-air cuisine on my warped burnt orange kitchen set. This was where I first learned to answer phones, a skill I would take with me into adulthood. If only I could say as much for the cooking... 

When life as the maitre d' of the Cactus Bay Restaurant became a drudgery, I morphed into a librarian, organizing a family's worth of books in the middle of the basement. It remained, more or less, organized until my parents remodeled a couple years back, undoing all of my hard work and tossing most of the books. At least I hadn't gotten more than five books into the card catalog system I'd dreamed up before deciding I wasn't thatbored. Librarians of the world, I salute..... zzzzz. 

When it used to dump dozens of inches of the white stuff in Michigan, I'd bundle myself up and run around the yard. My shuffling footprints became paths, and the longer I played, the more places there were to discover. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. "Who's the crazy kid talking to herself over there all by herself?" "Oh, her. Whatever you do, don't make eye contact." 

I played with a gaggle of Barbie dolls and the solitary (but insanely lucky) Ken doll. Barbie(s) and Ken fell in love; got in jealous, hair-pulling cat-fights with unsurprising frequency; awkwardly rode their palomino horse, Dallas, even though their rubber-snappy legs weren't really horse-worthy; and went swimming. Of course they went swimming! The only outfit I had for Ken was the shiny purple swim trunks he'd been wearing in the box. Out of pity for perpetually-underdressed Ken, there were an abundance of luaus. That was much easier than, gasp!, buying him a pair of pants. It was nearly the same with My Little Ponies, except they were already horses, so they didn't need to worry about being ill-designed to ride themselves.  Interestingly enough, the ponies were all girls, as far as I could tell, but there were an awful lot of babies within the herd. No one ever explained that one to me, and I'm still wondering. 

A family friend gave us an incredible handmade dollhouse that had been his daughter's when she was a young girl. It was the most magical thing I thought I'd ever laid eyes upon, and not a bit of it was made of plastic or blonde hair. There were still hair-pulling cat-fights, but those usually took place after sipping from a teeny mason jar of sweet tea while sitting on the wraparound porch, perusing miniature copies of The New Yorker. You know, like in real life. 

During a particularly inventive time in my life, I collected Happy Meal toys. Besides the fact that they were way more awesome back then, I was fresh off my first read-through ofThe Indian in the Cupboard. In that classic book, the main character, a young boy named Omri, brings a toy Indian (and, eventually, other toys) to life by locking them in a magical cabinet. Well aware that magical toy-incarnating furniture was not easily located within K-Mart, I was hopeful that my cluttered bedroom closet would be the next-best-enchanted thing. At night I would lock up my plastic Miss Piggy figurine and tell myself that maybe in the morning she would be asking me to transform cold, lifeless Kermie, too. Of course, it never happened, and for that I'm probably thankful. A few decades later, I realize that I would have likely soiled myself in fear if I'd managed to bring life to any of the things I locked in that closet. 

My extensive stuffed animal collection made up my entourage, headed up by the purple pony I named "Diamond" after a palomino mare Mom attempted to buy and promptly returned after she repeatedly walloped on our poor Tennessee Walker, Jake. Stuffed-animal Diamond managed to escape from a trip to Lost Toyville after she'd had the brilliant idea to hide in a twist of hotel sheets during a Wild West road trip. A nice maid rescued her, and she's been with me ever since. I still wonder how many miles my parents had to backtrack to the previous night's hotel just so I would stop howling.

Somewhere on the outskirts of my posse was my Cricket doll. After dad let me watch the first Chucky movie at the ripe old age of eight, she was banished to a black garbage bag in the corner of the basement. Rest in pieces, scary doll.

Being easily-amused has always had its advantages. I'd like to believe that having to rely so heavily on entertaining myself, especially in those years prior to my own pony, the goodness that was the Nintendo Entertainment System, and pretty much every single bit of technology we have now, I was preparing myself for something much bigger. My thoughts and feelings were solely mine then, not given a lot of chance to find a living, breathing audience. And even though I found a fairly reliable pressure-release valve the first time I put my leg over a horse, I also discovered that I'd taken on another role--counselor. By putting ink to paper, I learned to get it all out, because sometimes that was the only way I knew how. Some of those joys and hurts are still bottled up, others have made their way to the surface. Somehow writing for my therapy, my sanity, also became writing for my enjoyment... and, if you really think about it, maybe the two aren't all that different.

My writing had been going so well until losing Moe, my horse and best friend of 19 years. For the past several weeks I'd been making progress on the second draft of my novel, putting in 20-30 hours a week before everything crumbled around me. And now, there's nothing. The only thing I can seem to string together are old stories about time spent with my old guy. It feels like there is a dam in place somewhere deep inside of me that isn't letting anything flow unless it's about him. And it's not for lack of trying. Yesterday I sat with my latest chapter staring me in the face and I managed to add only a few sentences in as many hours. It's frustrating. Yes, I want to write about Moe and all of these things we experienced together, but I also want to finish this draft. 

A search on "grieving and writer's block" led me to this article. In the article, there was a specific quote that really resonated with me. 
Considering that a writer's creativity is part of their psychological identity, it is not surprising that what affects people as individuals, also affects them as writers.The part of me that allows me to weave tales is the part of me that is also still so much in shock with every emotion under the sun. I also read another bit in this article that makes me realize that maybe I'm in some kind of purgatory. 
Writers hurt when they can’t write. They may not realize it, but their behavior speaks volumes. Often, writers will go through a series of stages before they are ready to write again and these stages are similar to the Kübler-Ross stages of grief in psychology. In other words, when writers can’t write they grieve, so it makes sense that the stages of writer’s block would parallel the stages of grief.I am a writer; whether you consider me one or not is of no consequence to me. I know what I am, and the above quote is revealing itself to be true. It's painful not to write when you know it's one of the reasons you're here.

So if you wonder why I can't "get over it already", first of all, you don't "get it" at all. But also, I am determined to keep the words from petrifying within me and taking away my other great passion. The loss of two loves within the same week is surely more than I want to deal with now.

Writing for an audience is oppressive.  Writing with an audience is unnerving to the point of paralysis.  I can't stand for the husband to look over and read whatever it is I'm currently working on.  Maybe it goes back to the time a few years ago when I allowed him to read something of which I was very proud, and he promptly turned to me and, in all seriousness, suggested I needed therapy.  No, you goon, that was my therapy.  Yeah, perhaps that's it.  THAT GUY officially is no longer allowed to have an opinion on or even catch an eyeful of anything I type.

To be in my personal 'writing happy place', I prefer dead quiet or music appropriate to my mood.  I do not, on the other hand, find myself to do well with constant traffic in and out of my room, door slams, running cats/barking dogs, wrestling, or video game sound effects.  It's summer vacation.  With four kids home all day every day, imagine the impact these strict parameters have on my word count.  Mmmhmm.

And what do I do when stories need to be told now or never, but they're completely separate from what I'm working so hard to complete.  First world problems, absolutely, but still new and confusing to me.

“Write about what you know, Anne.”  That’s was my mother’s knee-jerk response every time I mentioned my idea to finally get down to writing a book.  Historically, my mother had always been an undiagnosed romance book junkie, except I couldn’t recall her ever having a moment to herself to read.  Instead, she subjected us to countless hours of movie and television adaptations of her favorite love stories.  Anne of Green Gables?  Absolutely.  Jane Eyre (the version starring Timothy Dalton only need apply, thankyouverymuch!)?  Yes and yes.  If I took the time to do the math, Mom had probably spent months of her life engrossed in someone else’s love, and nearly always from a completely different era.  Writing about what I knew, advice from L. M. Montgomery’s leading fella, Gilbert Blythe, to his future Mrs. Blythe, was a tall order.  I hadn’t led a life full of hijinks, ambition, or flirtation.  The list of subjects I knew resembled a hastily-scribbled note for forgotten items from my last shopping trip.  Topics I had little to no knowledge of likely could fill volumes of books, which could, in turn, pour out endlessly from countless rooms.

‘Writing what you know’ sounds like the easiest task in the world.  But what happens if you write what you know and it’s so minuscule you can’t bear it?