By now I ought to be used to surprise. So few of my experiences have matched my expectations. The fascinating dichotomy between my assumptions and reality that has been on my mind the most of late is what I figured would happen with this site upon becoming a parent. Over the years of maintaining ironSoap, my slice-of-life rambling had been, I suppose, my bread and butter. Well, that and digression about pop culture.<\/p>\n
I naturally assumed that having a child would provide me with a bounty of anecdotes to \u201chumorously\u201d relate in my overly-verbose way. And, in fact, becoming a father did<\/i> give me loads of material to work with. But the archives don\u2019t lie. I didn\u2019t do with that material what I expected I would. Sure, I\u2019ve written a few posts here and there, maybe a half dozen in total. In that same time frame I wrote probably an equal amount about non-family topics. I really thought that having a child would provide my muse, give me the inspiration to return to regular updates and ensure they attained and (perhaps more significantly) retained a high level of quality. We even named our daughter after a muse, for pete\u2019s sake.<\/p>\n
Funny thing is, I wasn\u2019t actually wrong in the strictest sense, I was just way off base. Despite the drastic reduction of output over the last few years, I\u2019ve been writing more than ever. What I didn\u2019t expect was that having a child would inspire me not to do what I had been doing only more<\/i> and\/or better<\/i>, but it would inspire me at last to do what I really wanted. Turns out, writing one-draft blog posts wasn\u2019t it. Writing fiction\u2014telling stories\u2014is what I\u2019ve wanted to do, all along. I guess in a manner of speaking I\u2019ve always been telling stories on ironSoap. But there are stories I can tell with ease and there are stories I must tell with sweat and tears.<\/p>\n
The muse my daughter actually represents is the one that says, \u201cIf you want me to chase my dreams, first you have to chase your own.\u201d What she really did was free me from my fear of the work inherent in getting to the stories that aren\u2019t lived but dreamed. The transmutation of dream to word is a prickly process, one with a short fuse and long teeth. But it seems I have the best guide, one who pulls me along with a tiny, insistent hand in mine.<\/p>\n
from ironSoap<\/a> \u2014 April 25, 2013 at 12:50PM<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By now I ought to be used to surprise. So few of my experiences have matched my expectations. The fascinating dichotomy between my assumptions and reality that has been on my mind the most of late is what I figured would happen with this site upon becoming a parent. Over the years of maintaining ironSoap, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ironsoap"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2221\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}