My wife and I are writing a student textbook for our field. The book is slated to be published late this year, under my real name (hers as well), with a well-known educational publisher. We’ve been working on this project, in some form, since 2011. We’re working under a royalty contract, so we haven’t seen much money from the work. We will, though, once the book is published. It’s targeting the CAMENA market (Central Asia, Middle East, and Northern Africa) and expected to sell lots of copies. It’s all very exciting.

But it’s a lot of work. Tight deadlines. Second drafts that feel like first drafts. Differences of opinion with the editor. Late nights writing. Early mornings editing. Basically, it’s like…writing. I type that obvious statement because it took me a while to really realize what I was doing. To realize that even though I thought I’d stopped writing for a while, i’ve actually been writing the entire time. I’d shut down my daily writing challenge and my weekly submission schedule for SFF fiction because I’d gotten so busy with other stuff: college, tenure, acceleration projects, and this textbook. I felt like I’d shelved my writing career for a while.

Then I realized that I was writing. Every day, in fact. Just not the SFF I really wanted to be writing.

Still, i was practicing (am practicing) skills that I used when I wrote SFF every day and skills I will use when I pick that endeavor back up. Word count. Succinctness. Making every word count. Hitting (or not) deadlines. Shitty first drafts. Editing. Painful revisions. Frustration. Anxiety. And, eventually, a finished product that resembles more a teenager raised since birth instead of a 50,000 word document. A living, breathing child.

So hear I am, knee-deep in a textbook, not writing but #amwriting all at the same time. I’m slowly picking up my SFF pen as this textbook project winds down (hopefully complete by May), and I have to say, I’ve been itching to write. The stories I’ve been telling myself in my head since I last wrote a story are starting to come out. I feel in a holy place when I’m writing stories, something that textbook writing doesn’t give me. Writing fills a hole in my soul, but writing stories is my soul–even if my stories are still mainly exercises.

One day, I’ll get to the point where my stories are exceptional. I believe that just as I believe today that my stories are in no way exceptional. In fact, most are downright awful. But there’s the rare gem that pokes out through the rough patches, the sparkle that makes me hum, and I think, “Yes. This is what i’m supposed to be doing.”