My "Voice"

I recently returned to Texas from a month-long vacation to my childhood home of New York.  I had the opportunity to visit with many good people, including family and old friends.  With my two sons, I spent the first two weeks or so tripping down Memory Lane, doing my best to give them a better idea of who their dad is.  This included a visit to my father's grave site in Valhalla.
My point here is that I had many "blogworthy" experiences while in New York.  Yet I wrote about none of them.  When I ask myself why I wasn't able to jot down Word One, I think about a conversation I had with one old friend, as we sat drinking beer in one of the East Village haunts of our youth.  He mentioned enjoying my posts in the past and wondered why I'd stopped writing my blog.

"I guess I'm just a little tired of my own voice" I answered wryly.  "'Yeah, yeah, this thing your kid did reminds you of this thing that happened in your past. We get it, Dan.'""

"Uh, okay," my friend said when I was done mocking myself. "Well I still thought it was good."

I don't mean to make light of praise.  Even though gratification comes more quickly than it did back in the days of sending short stories, along with a self-addressed return envelope, we writers still yearn for feedback.  Especially when it's positive.

Good and great writers find their voices and share them as much as they can, unapologetically.  I wonder, though, if the authors whose work I love ever went through a period of silence like the one I'm breaking with this post.

I'm sure my three-month hiatus is more complicated than I make it out to be here.  The reasons I've not been writing anything are probably numerous.  One of them may have been that I was too busy living my life to write about it.

Be that as it may, however, I am, apparently, back.

Underwater with Jackson and his cousin Andrew at Great Wolf Lodge

(One of the many fabulous experiences I DIDN'T write about while on vacation...)