The 3 Lives of DL Hanlon

I have always said I had two lives – BC and AD (Before Children and After Delivery). No matter how much you swear that children will not change the way you live your life, they do. Those of you who have children know what I mean by this. Some hobbies and activities you are able to maintain after they come along but many that you enjoyed before giving birth are ones that you no longer seem to have the time, money, or energy to continue.

For example, before the birth of my first child, I used to love to go clubbing. I was never much of a drinker. As a matter of fact, I am a lightweight. But I loved to dance. In the days before video game consoles and DDR, your only alternative was clubbing. Sure I could have thrown on a record album (yeah, I know how much I’m dating myself) and gone to town. And I did. But it was not the same. It didn’t have the same energy. It also didn’t have the camaraderie that I also enjoyed.

I told you in ‘Cause We’re VIPs and we Bang Like This’ that I was no stranger to queuing because I grew up without online ticketing. This is because I was also an avid science fiction and fantasy fan and I stood in line for hours waiting to buy tickets for the premier showings of Star Trek The Motion Picture and the original Star Wars. This too became difficult with an infant in tow especially since at the time I lived in Philly and the northern winter climates were too harsh for a baby. So I had to ‘settle’ for seeing them after they’d been out awhile and the lines had died down.

And through it all you had to work around the hassle of finding a sitter and the tightened budget from that additional expense. And so you find new hobbies and activities to fill those voids. For example, I discovered a talent for sewing and needlework. It was not unusual for me to have many different projects that I was working on simultaneously. I became good enough that I was even doing custom wedding and bridesmaid dresses. These could be worked on during the children’s naptimes and after they had gone to bed in the evening.

One of the ones that remained constant was writing in my diary. We didn’t call them journals back then. In my BC days, I had friends who belonged to APAs (Amateur Press Associations). Some were fanzines; others were writing groups. Although I was not a member of any of them, I had friends who would send me their rough drafts and ask for my opinion and help in polishing which I gladly gave. A couple of them I even helped plot.

Through all of this, I never once considered myself a writer or even dreamed of becoming one. If you had asked me, I would have told you that if, in my wildest fantasies I was to write a book, I would probably have told you that it would be science fiction or fantasy since those were the genres that I enjoyed reading most. Maybe I would have said murder mystery since I would pick up one of those every now and then. And, let’s be honest, aren’t there a few people at the office you’ve imagined bumping off? But, I never would have answered ‘romance’. Never. I loathed them with a passion.

I have since learned that you should never say the word never. And not just about writing. About anything. When you say the word ‘never,’ the universe laughs and starts moving all the little chess pieces around. And I was one of their pawns because it seems that now that the children are getting married and the last one is looking at going to college out of state that I am in the process of ‘re-inventing’ myself for a third time. This incarnation seems to be as a writer. And my first novel is the last thing that I ever imagined myself writing – a romance. For more back story, read ‘Down The Rabbit Hole.’

Now, I really can’t tell you what I thought it would be like to be a writer. I guess that I must have had some type of preconceived notion because the writing process keeps surprising me. I wrote my first novel in a little over ten weeks. It was not an obsession; it was a possession. These characters had a story to tell and I was their ghost writer. Many were the times when I would sit down at the keyboard with my music playing in the background, set my fingers on the keys and enter a trance-like state. My fingers had volition of their own as they sequentially set down scene after scene.

As a matter of fact, on the few occasions when I didn’t follow this process, I would often struggle with what went down on the paper. Invariably, at some point, one of the characters would jump in and ‘take over’ scolding me that it was NOT what they would say or do and promptly correct my error.

It was not unusual to wake up from a dead sleep with entire paragraphs streaming through my head. The first time it happened, I awoke at 2am in the morning with an entire chapter of data in RAM that needed to be dumped. By the time I finished, it was only a half hour before I had to get up to go to work. That was a very long day indeed.

This happened frequently enough that I became so sleep deprived that on the weekends when I would normally have the time to set aside to write, I found myself sleeping around the clock to catch up on all the hours that I missed during the week.

It got so bad that one night I woke up in this state and the paragraph started streaming through my semi-conscious brain, “Angelique Randolph blah, blah, blah.” And I sat up in bed, threw my pillow across the room, and screamed at the empty room, “Angelique Randolph rolled over and went back to sleep! THAT’S what Angelique Randolph did!” It was a petulant display of bravado since Angelique won as I dragged myself to the laptop at my desk.

Even my blogs seem to come to me wholly written. It’s as if they simmer unattended on some burner in the back of my brain. At some point the words turn into a rolling boil and bubble over, splashing and making sizzling noises as they hit the flames. Just like when it happens in the kitchen and you make a mad dash to the stove to turn down the knob or remove the pot, I make a beeline to the computer. Because I’ve learned that the voices will not be quiet unless I set them down.

There are those who say that you go through intense periods of grief and loneliness when your children leave the nest. But I don’t think that I am going to be one of them because I have plenty of company that comes uninvited and at the oddest hours. Perhaps it is why they chose to appear at this time of my life. And so, instead of dreading this prospect, I am actually looking forward to it. So here’s to my third life, EN (Empty Nest). Here’s to reincarnations. Here’s to the lives of my newest children - the ones that will make sure that I never truly have an empty nest. They are ones that I might not have gone through labor to bring into this world, but ones that I gave birth to nonetheless.