#IWSG: Life and Writing

Welcome to October! It's the first Wednesday of the month which means it's time to let our insecurities hang out. Yep, it's the Insecure Writer's Support Group blog hop. If you're a writer at any stage of career, I highly recommend this blog hop as a way to connect with other writers for support, sympathy and networking. If you're a reader, it's a great way to peek behind the curtain of a writing life. 

The October question - How do major life events affect your writing? Has writing ever helped you through something?

After you check out my post, be sure to check out the rest of the hop! Especially our co-hosts:  Dolorah @ Book Lover, Christopher D. Votey, Tanya Miranda, andChemist Ken!
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In my author bio, a line I often include is: "I write because it's cheaper than therapy."

I'm not really joking. Writing has been my main coping mechanism since I could write. Maybe even before that. I still kept a journal before I could write, it was just full of drawings. When I was mad at my mom as a child, she would find a long letter shoved under her door expressing all the way in which I'd been wronged.

Later some of this came out in poetry. My adolescent work is all pretty directly about the drama and pain of my teenaged life, though I was starting to make some attempt to write about it more universally.

As an adult, I still journal from time to time (especially during times of stress), but now that writing is separate from my fiction. That's probably good, because I'm fortunate enough to lead a pretty boring life: stable, full of love, and light on serious trauma. It makes a good life, but it would make a boring book.

Not that my issues don't come out in my fiction.

It's just less direct now. Sometimes I don't even know it until it's all written and I'm reading it afterwards.

Anyone reading my Menopausal Superhero series will see that I have a profound mistrust of the medical establishment, for example. I'll recognize relationship dynamics from my real life among my characters, showing me that I must have been working through my feelings through my art again. 

The subconscious is always processing things behind the scenes, and often the results are delivered to me in story form.

I'm grateful to have found an outlet that works for me and isn't dependent on my financial state or access to outside resources. I hold out hope that it will always be enough to keep me feeling balanced.