Life as a House

my husband, setting the new wall between our basement office and the furnace room

Life is so much like a house. 

There's always something to fix or change, redo or update.  Like the basement my husband and I have been remodeling for the past year.  Replacing walls.  Pouring concrete.  Sheetrock and insulation.  Tile.  We're old pros, to tell the truth; this is the fifth house we've remodeled together.  We've done it for so long I swear we could build one from scratch.  (Well, my husband could.  He worked construction in his twenties and admittedly, I'm no good with a jack-hammer.)  By the time we're done with a room I love it passionately; I've cleaned every inch, painted every corner, given away everything we no longer use.  Refreshed space has awesome karma.

If you've ever remodeled a house, you know the process is one of endless surprises--pockets of space someone else boxed off for no reason, crooked walls, ugly fixture choices to correct, bad wiring and plumbing to update.  There's always something old to rip out, something to fix.

Remodeling houses is a lot like building a great life, but it's also a lot like writing.  Which says volumes about why I love to write.  I love how stories evolve.  How something seems right one day and has to be trashed the next.  I love how my characters come alive and speak to me, how their story feels so important to me when it's being written.  Once I've spent a year or two or ten writing a story I'm so in love with it, it's hard to decide I've finished.  I don't want to let the characters go.

Until I start the next story . . . .