I woke up this morning and thought it would really be great to stay in bed all day. Read and watch movies. Take an honest day off, because one thing I’ve learned is that I don’t know how to just be. My “days off,” now that I’m not working, are always filled with a million chores and projects.

Last night was the final class of Donald Maass’ Virtual Breakout Novel Intensive. I could say I’ve learned so much in the last few weeks, but it’s more like I’ve awakened. It’s literally changed how I write and read and see the creative landscape. When I had my meeting with Don, I noted I’d spent the last few years taking various writing seminars in the hopes of finding a scary challenge (and was always disappointed). Not so with this one. This was hard. In all the best ways, and in fact, so hard, and I’m so out of practice with being challenged, and doing homework, and really throwing myself into attempting a technique, that it was a struggle. And now I’m facing Guess what, girl, your novel needs to be stripped down completely and rebuilt, and this is going to take you months.

Before we signed off for the last time, my classmates seemed thrilled at the prospect of diving in deep, but I felt a mix of both dread and self-doubt. Those fellow writers, they’d always put their novels first. They’d made their work and their craft their priorities. Me? Not so much. On intense consideration, I’ve done that my whole life. My writing—hell, anything I’ve wanted to do—has come second to whatever anyone else needs and expects.

This started in my childhood, when my life was dictated by my parents—and not in a healthy way. They were pretty bad; everything was about them and their needs, their moving goalposts, buying into their particular cultish brand of crazy and respecting their constant criticism. Here’s what my childhood looked like: “You will play trumpet, not flute,” “You will spend every Sunday singing in the church choir,” “Your mother has cancer, you will clean the house and feed the kids every day,” “On the one day you’re not doing anything, you will spend it with your grandmother and aunts in West Haven,” “Why are you sitting there on the couch? There’s plenty of work to do around here,” “Why are you wasting your time writing a story no one’s going to read?,” “I won’t pay for college unless you go for something at which you can make money later,” “Kristin Mary, you’re too fat to wear that,” “I don’t care if you’re hungry, I’m busy, you know where the food is,” “Friends will always abandon you so you really shouldn’t have them, family is the only thing you can count on!” (Note: That last one I ignored. My friends take precedent, and they still do to this day. I guess even as a young person, I could see how dysfunctional my parents’ insular philosophy was). All of this while the community around us adored them—The Petersens were sooo talented and soooo awesome! So I grew up having my life completely dictated, and then when it wasn’t, I’d just keep taking on more responsibilities—like volunteering or acting in community theater or getting a second job or establishing a writing group or running a magazine—to fill that hole, all the while wondering why others had writing careers and mine seemed to be stuck.

In the past, I’d blamed that on many things—they knew people, it was luck, you don’t deserve what they have—but now I understand that it was because of me. That I didn’t invest one hundred percent and put that writing above all else. Because it was never my top goal… survival was.

In my FB feed this morning, another one of those Buddha’s Teaching memes popped up: “After a certain age, you are no longer a product of your environment or the way you were raised. It’s a personal choice to live the way you do. You either take ownership of your life or become a prisoner to excuses.” This was particularly poignant—I’ve been a prisoner to excuses. Sure, at the outset, it was my parents’ fault. But even though they’re dead now and can’t hurt me anymore, I’m still repeating their warped mantras that lead to poor choices on how my time is spent, and that’s on me.

Holy crap.

It’s time for me to change, to put my writing, and my novel, first. It sounds so easy to resolve. But I have a lot of work to do on a couple of short stories on deadline, and Tidings. How am I going to do that with everything else? Because let’s face it, I can’t just hole up in my bedroom every day and not function. Should I ensure I get an hour a day? Ensure I get two hours a day? I honestly have no idea.

I suppose, like anything else, baby steps. I did make fabulous headway on my new short story yesterday, and was really happy with the few opening paragraphs (until, of course, I learned something so amazing in Don’s class that I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least attempt to reconfigure it). That was where I was going to start. But first?

I went down to the living room to get my sticker books, because I wanted to do my first fifteen minute relaxation session of the day—clear my head of the over think (activities like this calm the nervous system, which is part of my healing journey). I’d finished the Vintage Birds my friend Jen C had Christmas gifted, and I’m moving on to Vintage Sea Life. The question of what one does with a sticker book after you finish it is an interesting one, and so Birds had been on the couch for a few weeks because I was using it for notepaper. When I grabbed Sea Life, something else slid off the pile and floated to the floor—a torn-out completed sticker page of cockatoos. Beneath their feet, I’d written, “Hot Times at the Dinosaur Bidet, 11/15/25.”

This was some story idea, and I love when I find them scribbled around. But for the life of me, I couldn’t recall it. It was gone forever. Why I hadn’t put down further details is beyond me; if it’d been only the title, I would’ve noted that.

My thoughts turned to my current story. It had this really pretentious title—“Mortal, Can These Bones Live?”—something I’d pulled out of Ezekiel from the Bible when I was doing research on 1999 doomsday prophecies. There was a valley of dry bones, and the Lord breathed life into them. In particular, there’s this one incredible verse in which the narrator hears the bones rattle followed by some toe-curling words about the lashing of tendons (it really is creepy. Here’s a link to the NIV version if you’re curious: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ezekiel%2037&version=NIV). But as much as I thought that title was perfect? Who’s not going to have his interest piqued by “Hot Times at the Dinosaur Bidet”? And you know what—it actually fits the character and the voice of the story much better.

Not that I’m leaving the Valley of Dry Bones behind. References to that were going to appear in the story anyway, and there’s really no reason to take them out—although I don’t want it to be too much of a repeat of my popular “A Bone to Pick” story (it won second place in Toasted Cheese’s 2012 Dead of Winter contest, and that can be read here: https://tclj.toasted-cheese.com/2012/12-1/a-bone-to-pick-by-kristi-petersen-schoonover/). But there’s something interesting about that, too—the raising of the dead in the Valley of Dry Bones—in that this is where my stories always seem to go. Back to things in my past that really have no business being clawed into the present.

Perhaps this time, I will finish the story and let the bones lie.