I really have been writing all this time.....just not on this blog. I should have been writing here, but let me tell you, cancer changes things. It changes our time availability, our priorities, our focus and our energy. If you don't know, my husband has been battling B-Cell Lymphoma for the past few months. His treatment involved aggressive chemotherapy, twice-daily abdominal shots, weekly visits to The Johns Hopkins Hospital for lab work and complete exhaustion most days after work. Cancer changes every aspect of your life and your family's life. This has been the summer of cancer. I had to let a few things go. Even though I've kept writing, it has been highly affected by his cancer battle. Tomorrow is a milestone for his cancer, however, as he has his final PET scan to see if the chemo worked. They have given us every reason to expect a good report. They expect him to be cancer-free. I hope they are right. We are ready to put this behind us. ~Tricia

I read a few tips on writing from J.R.R. Tolkien today and this one, "Keep writing, even through adversity," really spoke to me because our family is facing a time of great adversity. 19 days ago, a large tumor was discovered at the base of my husband's spine. It turned out to be cancer and quickly turned our lives upside down. You can read more of that story here , on another one of my blogs. Yesterday, I posted on The Total Writer's Facebook page that I'm taking a hiatus from writing in order to deal with my husband's cancer. Well, today, I'm discovering that I can't keep to that. I can't not write. I need to write and was feeling very much like I needed to write, but felt guilty as though, somehow, my writing was an invalid distraction to the cancer and all it entails. But, today, I no longer feel that way. I realized, through reading J.R.R. Tolkien's tip to write through adversity, that writing through his cancer is actually a good,...